RAGE QUIT

Paradise City

2011-08-16T11:35:00.000-07:00

I've not really been keeping up to date with the general happenings in the world of football for a while, other than following Leeds of course.

I've been keeping an eye on the Premier League as the season opened this year and one thing caught my eye. I think that Mancini must have played FML ! Man City have a squad which is full of all the FML cheat players.

Aguero was pretty much a one man team for me on FML, but not only do they have him they have Balotelli, Dzeko and Tevez - all of whom were prime time cheat players which would make a team on their own. If there wasn't enough they have a proven corner hack in the guise of Micah Richards. Looking at their squad it's almost like a role call of the FML greats ! On paper they are my bet to win the league.

I've not managed to get into FM11 at all since FML ended. I don't really know why, the series has lost something for me. It seems a bit sterile and lacking personality and I find the interface to be very clunky. I installed CM 97/98 for a laugh yesterday and reckon the interface on that is actually better than the new versions... I'm sure everyone received a very bling bling email highlighting what I assume are supposed to be the best features for FM12, all of which are massively uninspiring. I mean, lets look at a promotional video
FM12 gameplay footage
really ? Is that seriously an official video ?

Anyway with a 'SI' of disappointment, with all this gloom in the world of football management, there's still one hope. Can the community make a decent game ? There's some positive rumblings and a lot of work going on with Ultimate Football Live.

Ultimate Football Live

There's some really good ideas and discussions going on over there - I just hope whatever comes out doesn't try and copy FML and all it's failings too much. I think they could pull it off. Whatever is used as a "ME" doesn't even need to be that strong to start with imo, as long as results are fairly logical it can be built on, and i'd guess the ME would be the hardest part to build.

I think it was on one of the very early CM games, maybe CM1 where the loading screen used to say something like "made for football fans by football fans" - i'm paraphrasing as I can't find it now. I can't actually find any reference to this anywhere so I might have made it up, in which case maybe use it as a tag line :p

It always put a picture in my mind of some random fans just making a game which turned out to be great. Here's hoping for another.

Praise You

2011-04-27T04:32:00.000-07:00

I can't say I have tested this extensively but i've noticed something odd with team talks. It's probably common knowledge in some circles but I thought I may as well share it if anyone is still playing the last season.

Basically, no matter how bad your team is performing just praise them and they get a morale boost. Just tell them you are pleased even if you are losing and they suddenly look delighted with your talk and get morale boosts.

I've noticed it normally says "nothing specific noted" with pretty much every team talk other than telling them you are pleased.

The Great Escape

2011-04-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to mention this for about 3 years now but...

You know the notification sound you get when a friend signs out ? Every time I hear this I hum the tune to "the great escape" because it sounds like the first 2 notes of the main part of the song.

You're 3-0 up against a CPU team in your league, there's 15 minutes to go........ It's 3-3 within the blink of an eye. The game continues to mock me.

Having said that, previous game, it's 1-1, i'm down to 10 men and I go on to win 5-1. Clearly i'm a genius.

Guessing there wont be a great escape for FML now though :(

Closing Time

2011-04-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

Open all the doors and let you out into the world
Turn all of the lights on over every boy and every girl
One last call for alcohol so finish your whiskey or beer
You don't have to go home but you can't stay here

There were good times and bad times over the past three years but I will certainly carry many fond memories of my time with FML. I don't think many if any other game has created so much passion, frustration, happiness, sadness and rage has FML has brought me.

Much of the rage was caused by simple issues and design choices which could so easily have been avoided with a little more consideration. But despite this I did have a lot of amazing times especially pre-reset in St John.

Everyone hated 460, but I made it myself before I heard or seen anyone else playing it and spent weeks and months perfecting it with my mate. Yeah it may have been dodgy but this is my single proudest achievement since playing CM1. Going 90 games unbeaten with a tactic I made, with a team I made. (ended by a 2-legged cup tie!!)

I'll never forget the legend of Franco Brienza destroying everyone in sight until the ripe old age of 36 after being signed in season 1. Everyone in St John probably remembers my Franco obsession !

I've never played a game before where the community had a direct line to the development team. I remember discussing player wage auctions with Ov on Christmas Day year before last and receiving emails from Marc Duffy after posting various rants on here. Things like this made it obvious how much they cared about the game. I feel massively privileged for being allowed to have some input into one of my all time favourite franchises which I have played since about 1994.

But then there's the other side of it. So much more could have easily been done to make the game work but it was just never attempted. So much more could have been done on the community side of things but it so often wasn't. Accepting they were going to go with the flawed FA system I suggested some ideas for the Extra FA (or whatever it's called these days).. I emailed the orgs and mods, I posted suggestions on the forum, I emailed support, I posted suggestions on here but I didn't even get the courtesy of a response in game. Maybe they had their own ideas instead, but instead they did NOTHING for seasons then when they did it was something utterly shocking. This is what leaves me feeling bitter. Great ideas ignored as people pursued their own agenda and ego. I'm referring to GW stuff here rather than the development side of things. The only response I ever got was "we haven't got time to do this, we have lifes" - Then why the hell are you a frigging mod ?

I could dig up dozens examples of a total unwillingness to try fun things despite massive support in in the GW but it's done now. I just hope these people realise they are as responsible for the downfall of this game as SI are.

The game doesn't even need that much to work in it's current format. It needs more hooks to stay online, it needs PvE so people are around more so there's more opportunity to play games live, the FA structures need changing and seasons need to be shorter. It needs ad-hoc official competitions and leagues and special events running every day. A busy full gameworld with loads of competitions for every ability massively helps the issue with people not being able to win. They would have so many more opportunities rather than a season of being shit which lasts a whole month and has no joy.

Anyway, thanks for the memories, thanks for the hard work. Some of the mistakes are unforgivable at this point but come FM12 i'm sure all will be forgotten. You will no doubt see me raging in general discussion for FM for many years to come.

ps - In case anyone hasn't realised, the rage thing was mainly an angle to make a blog about my team more interesting. I think it went quite well :)

Time for you to go out to the places you will be from
This room won't be open till your brothers or your sisters come
So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits
I hope you have found a friend
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

Death then

2011-04-14T08:42:00.001-07:00

Oh dear..

Death or Glory

2011-04-12T10:11:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to get round to writing a blog post for about a month but I don't really have much of interest to say, so i'm going to post something anyway.

I am still alive and still playing FML in Miller albeit with much less passion and intensity of days gone by.

I'm actually really enjoying it, I found my team languishing in the lower divisions of the OFA and have been slowly working my way up since then. I've gone for a different approach to the past by not copying the popular tactics, by not signing the players who seem to be good purely because they have a few key attributes, by not relying on corners etc.

I've done something quite revolutionary for me when it comes to FML. I've signed players who look like decent footballers and put them into a realistic and balanced 4-4-2 system !

Anyway, it's going alright. I've generally had the best side by ability most seasons but not really tore any leagues apart. I've had a couple of promotions, missed out on a couple but i've been there or thereabouts. I'm really enjoying being a middle of the road side oddly. I suspect I would probably be doing better if I employed some of the more popular tactical choices mind.

I really like the removal of JP and the addition of player reports and i'm even enjoying selling players back to the world - even though it's an idiotic idea ! (beta experiment)

I'm not really sure what's going on with FML these days though as you have probably noticed, and there's a lot of chatter and rumour on the forums, SI seem to have disappeared. I can understand the forum absence but the sudden end of beta builds is very strange, they used to be pretty much a daily occurrence but we haven't had one for weeks or maybe even over a month.

So are SI secretly preparing a massive update ? Are they going to stop development and leave the game as is ? Has Ov given up on it ? I don't know, maybe there's personal reasons behind it as FML seems to pretty much start and end with Ov.

Who knows, but it removes a lot of motivation to report bugs, to raise issues, to post suggestions as the project seems to have stagnated.

FML had (or has) so much potential but it seems like it needs much bigger developer commitment and more resources to ever touch the mainstream. I think it's in the best state ever as a niche game so why it was never advertised and promoted even through free mediums is bizarre. Unless of course they were waiting for it to become a mainstream game first ?

Oh well, I hope there's some secret developments going on and we are going to see glory not death for FML.

Deep Deep Down

2011-02-26T15:03:00.000-08:00

So you have lost 1 game in your opening 11 of the league, everything is looking pretty good and your squad is generally stronger than the majority of the opposition.

So it begs the question, why is every player on poor morale ? Who knows...

Even a striker with a 0.71 goal per game ratio wants to kill himself because he is so unhappy with life.

Whatever..

Guess i'll just have to wait 3 months until someone realises that this is actually broken.

Hello

2011-02-11T14:17:00.000-08:00

I had an email recently about how one of my live teams had some cash in the bank and how I should come back.

So still being rather sceptical I decided to fire up the beta after spotting the icon on my desktop.

I had £16m in the bank so I went to look for some players. Not really sure what is going on with finances and stuff now. There's BV, TV, MV, PV and I think I got an STD too. I decided to just pay no attention to any of it seen as I had plenty of cash. After a week or two of casual play, and admittedly not making any attempt to read up, I don't know what any of it means still. But I shouldn't really have to go find out should I ?

I just bought some random players which looked okay, discarding any fannying about looking for special attributes and all that. I just signed some seasoned professionals and good all rounders who had a decent value. Played a few games and didn't notice much difference in the ME, still makes you lose games in the most rage inducing way and you still don't lose games fairly.

Anyway I think I won something like 7 in 12 games yet all my players still had poor morale. Pushed on to 3rd in the league but all my players are still suicidal which seemed to result in poorer results as it got worse for no logical reason. I did randomly find I actually had a second squad, which was seemingly hidden now you can have more, and found a player in there who hadn't played a game for 6 seasons who was better than all my strikers, which was a bonus.

Logged on most evenings and sort of enjoyed the game but i'm playing for like 20-30 minutes a day (easily enough time to play all my fixtures) and not paying for it. Logged on for first time in 2-3 days, no games to play, nothing to do, logged off. Same old story really.

The game looks a bit more professional now and things like the in game browser are nice touches but core gameplay wise, nothing has changed.

Still waiting for the revolution, not evolution.

I Me Mine

2010-10-14T15:16:00.000-07:00

Well I haven't been on FML for some time. Something else occupies all of my waking time now as well as my sleeping thoughts.

This game is Minecraft.

I'd say it ranks in the top 5 games i've ever played and it's like £8 or something. Go buy it.
http://minecraft.net/
(don't bother with the free version, it's not the same)

Imagine as a child someone told you if you went digging in your garden, you'd find loads of fucking awesome lego. Like LOADS of it and awesome caves, and with this lego you can build whatever you want. This is Minecraft.

I risked showing it to the girlfriend, who is now also addicted to it. I've turned her into a complete geek.

I have had quite a stressfull week, I burnt my bloody house down the other day and spent many hours rebuilding it. THEN I burnt down my entire estate, I came up from a mining trip to find everything which I had spent a week building, in flames. I felt physically sick but once again I rebuilt.

To make this vaguely football related, i'm currently building Elland Road. It's gonna be awesome.

Anyway, best go. I need to make sure the lava waterfall doesn't burn down my treehouse again, i'm keeping an eye on it while building my 2nd space invader above a nearby mountain.

Columbia

2010-09-29T02:47:00.000-07:00

So i'm off work this week, having my first sick day in nearly 3 years! Noticed an email in my inbox about the beta containing the new FM11 ME stuff. I'm undecided if I am going to buy FM11 this year as i'm still quite enjoying FM10 and i'm involved in a nice network game at the moment. But I was intrigued to see what the new graphics, stadium stuff and animations looked like so I decided to give it a download.

Surprisingly I still have a team (barely) which had finished 2nd in the 3rd tier of the OFA. It's interesting to note that without any involvement from me for about 4 months and a stadium on 0% my team has continued just fine and amassed a £10.8m balance.

Anyhow seen as i'm getting bored of nothing to moan about I figured if I created a team I could get involved with stuff on the forums again. To avoid me inevitably becoming annoyed I decided to take a new route and sign an all Columbian team.

The team so far is bloody awful so I wont become annoyed as I will deserve to lose most games. I don't intend to play many live matches, so i'm going to play it a bit like traditional fantasy football.

To add to the crazy i'm going to play 4-4-2. I've created a pretty funky 4-4-2 on FM10 so i'm not sure how it will translate into the new ME but it's working pretty well on there.

Standing in the Way of Control

2010-09-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting post on the forums at the moment here It links to Civilization creator Sid Meier speaking at a games development conference. He's a pretty clever chap responsible for many great games down the years and he makes some wonderful points which are ever so pertinent to FML.

Introduction to the game

He speaks about how important the first 15 minutes of a game are for the player stating they should be compelling and fun. It should make the player feel comfortable in the world and introduce them to loads of cool stuff and plant the seed that even cooler stuff is going to happen later on.

FML scores 0/10 on this front. It's a case of enter the Gameworld, read a few introductory text screens and pick some very poor players. Then you get taken to the match selector to play a CPU team. Once that is done then you might be waiting around for 15 days never mind 15 minutes for the season to kick off!

The player is not only left feeling slightly bewildered, but they have no good players, no specific short term goal or challenge and nothing else to do for a long period of time.

If FML had a proper PvE environment then this wouldn't be so much of an issue because a player could jump into that instead.

You see this 15 minute rule in so many games these days, how many racing games give you a super car fully kitted out with a big turbo and the best go faster stripes around at the start? You have a bit of a race before being dumped in a Fiat Punto but at least you know what you have to look forward to eh. You see it in other games too, the first example which comes to mind is a game I tried on the 360 last week which is Prototype. You start the game fully loaded with all your powers and abilities before regressing back to the start.

I suppose you could apply this to FML if you gave it some thought. Give a new manager Buckton Titans to manage for a day. Let them play in a proper PvE league and smash everyone in sight, hell let them play real players but not effect ranking points. Let them manage the England team for a week or so, whatever, think outside the box! Give them something fun and easy to do once they join up. Playing CPU challenges does not fall into the fun category ;)

Randomness

Sid Meier also speaks about how "acts of randomness need to be treated with a great deal of care" and that the player wants to be in control. If something is perceived to be random then paranoia strikes and the player looks for the worse possible explanation as to why something happened.

He goes on to speak about how a player is willing to accept something good happening against the odds as being completely normal. The psychology of the player is that they used a great strategy or they were cleverer. But conversely if something bad happens then the game is broken, something is wrong the game is cheating!

He says it is Important the player understands why something happens and how to prevent it from happening next time.

The above few paragraphs are some of the biggest problems you have with FML! The whole damn thing feels random and you have no bleeding clue what the hell is going on or why. Even after playing FML for so long I can give literally no explanation as to why I could have an appalling team smashing every team in sight only to sign a handful of better players and not be able to win a single game. I suppose I am guilty of accepting the good times as my own ability but blaming anything that goes wrong on the game being broken. But what else should I blame, I can see literally NO logical or rational explanation as to what is happening - therefore I blame the game.

I think first off to resolve this more transparency is needed about how certain aspects of the game work. It often seems that no one actually knows how certain FML specific things interact with the ME and I mean no one at SI !

Example, on my FM10 game my squad is very well blended together so much so "they are willing to die for each other" Now I read this and it's pretty clear what it means! So on FML, does this feature even EXIST ? Is there a hidden team blend rating like the FM series ? I've asked before, I don't know ?? Who does ? Does signing lots of players have a negative effect ??

Another example, players who can't speak the native language have communication problems on the pitch on FM. Surely this can't be in FML can it ? That would make no sense at all, but is it in ? We just don't know... The ME on FML has so much weird shit happening that it wouldn't surprise me if it still was.

Effect of changing tactics ? Time taken for squad to gel ?

I could reel of a couple of dozen similar questions to that which i've never found out the answer to on FML which is common knowledge and explained in game on FM. Sometimes some of these questions are put to Paul C and he doesn't seem to know either! I'd suggest a Q&A where some of these queries are answered.

I suppose they may as well add in the assistant feedback from FM10 too. It's not great, it's not THAT useful but it's something and some of the points can be of interest on occasion. But again, many of the points relate to how a player is used to playing and language issues and the like, the things we don't even know are in FML! But it does provide some useful information which you can adjust your tactics to, like explaining your long passes are not connecting or opposition instruction suggestions. It's useful if you are not very good at watching the game or just not watching it at all. I usually have a look over it when i'm in a bad patch in a game and all my players are performing well with no confidence issues. Sometimes I make a change based on the advise.

The odds

I've spoken about this a lot myself and in fact mentioned it in my last post. But players struggle to accept defeat against the odds, especially me. Sid talks about how when they displayed odds in game for example 3/1 players would just see the 3 and think that because they had the much bigger number they would always win. It's easy to forget that 1 time out of 4 the other team would win.

I think it would be beneficial to hide club reputation and the opposition average ability screen from anyone except the manager of that club. I've spoken about transparency earlier but I just don't think these are needed! You can easily look at opposition players and an opposition squad and get a feel about how good a team is. You don't need to be an experienced player to understand someone worth £5m is going to be better than someone worth £500k.

This would help alleviate some of the stress of when you are losing badly, you're looking for an explanation and you see the opposition club has an average ability of 12 while yours is 15. You see the bigger number and straight away move onto the game is broken theory. Reputation is probably less important but you could just change it to the ranking banding, so elite club, bronze club etc.

Anyhow, i'm probably the point where i've wrote so much no one is reading so i'll stop for now

Otherside

2010-09-17T03:33:00.001-07:00

Phone rings the other day....
"We have just had a baby on the Sims, what should we call it?"
"Franco" I suggest with enthusiasm
"Are you playing Football Manager??!"

Rumbled again.

Been playing some FM10 to pass the time these days. Although it's running an older version of the ME than FML it just seems to work so much better, presumably because the AI teams are fielding teams which represent a professional team rather than the weird stuff you get on FML.

Like, youth players are terrible, older players seem to play just fine and the 433 seems far less effective. My 35 wins in a row record was foiled by a 2 legged cup tie where I was 4-0 up, so a few things are the same ;) It's easy to see why SI might be scratching their heads sometimes when it all works so well on their flagship game.

The biggest difference is the effect or knocks, or rather the lack of an effect they have. If a player receives a knock you are often hard pushed to even work out which player it is because they lose so little condition. On FML a knock is usually the end of a game for a player but on FM10 they lose about 5-10% condition more often than not!

Secondly there's far far less injuries in matches. I get about 1 injury every 10 games that results in a player having to leave the field. It just feels more like what you would expect to see in a real football game rather than "ffs not again" as your 4th player goes off injured on FML.

Another thing came to mind too which is the perception of whether you should win a game or not. I was losing to Birmingham and I could feel myself becoming annoyed thinking "who the fuck are Birmingham and how dare they score against me!!" I found myself clicking on them trying to find out what their average squad ability was like you would find in FML. Except there is nowhere to see this, then I thought, well it is 2015, I actually have no idea how good they are other than their league position. Rage pacified because I was no longer sure if I should be expecting to win the game or not.

It does make me wonder if perhaps the ability of opposition teams should actually be hidden on FML so you can work it out for yourself by actually looking at the players. Ignorance is bliss and all that.

Oh and on FM10 you still get the "red arrows of doom" on young players just like you do on FML. It's not a problem on FM10 either, it's completely normal!

I see team talks are now coming to FML which I wouldn't really welcome. I remember when team talks were being discussed before they came into normal FM a few years back. My comment at the time was, unless there was literally hundreds of different things you could say, they would be pointless and annoying. Five years on there's still about 5 options and it is pointless and annoying. Fortunately on FM you can get your assistant to do the talk for you.

On FML you will have to do it because if your opposition is using them wisely then you are going to disadvantage yourself and potentially lose games because of it. The optimal talks don't even make sense half the time anyway so any experienced FM'ers are instantly going to have an advantage of knowing what to say and when.

I'm not really missing FML much at all and I think it would be difficult for me to return when i'm not available to play as much as I was a year ago. If they removed FAs completely and made everything ad hoc reputation based league structures then that would still appeal to me. So you could just join up to an official weekend league when you are around or a week long league then have a week off. That would be pretty cool and mean you'd have something to do when online and wouldn't miss stuff when you were offline. But that aint going to happen is it !

White Flag.

2010-08-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

Subscription cancelled.

Fuck this game, fuck the shitty match engine, fuck it up the arse, fuck everyone involved with it, i'm done. The game is horrifically broken.

Form is a complete fucking joke. Just because I lost a few games toward the end of last season and despite replacing much of my squad, why does this mean I have to start the next season in bad form ?

Why, despite having the best squad in the division in terms of ability can I not win a single game ? Why ? All of my players are prime match engine hackers, they are better than any other team in the division. My tactics are perfectly set up to exploit all the ME holes, yet I STILL CANT FUCKING WIN A GAME DUE TO THIS BULLSHIT FORM CRAP.

I've had 6 CCCS, i've had 60% possession, he scores with 1st shot on goal. He scores with 2nd shot on goal. I continue to dominate the game, it's 2-2. He's down to 10 men, OF FUCKING COURSE HE SCORES THE WINNER with his 3rd shot on goal.

I'm playing an all youth team with an average ability of 11. Most of his players don't have more than few attributes in double figures, yet he totally destroys me ? How on earth is this football ? What's changed from last season ? I replaced a load of 16k AF players, who won the division, with good players worth money?

Every game is freak series of events where I dominate the game and get screwed over by something totally bizarre. I've seen this in beta where I went from finishing 2nd in Premier League to relegation spots in the Championship in the space of 2 weeks. Right. Ok. That's not random is it ? Nope, not at all.

Like it's going to get any better with the new ME changes. We were complaining about this youth team crap in DECEMBER, NINE MONTHS ago. Why wasn't it fixed then ? How much longer before the new ME stuff is released ? It will no doubt still be broken in some new exciting way.

The 433 thing was well known before the reset too, it was moaned about on the beta forums quite a lot but again, "there's nothing to see here, move along"

There's absolutely nothing of interest in development for the game as far as I can see either. Youth academies are bollocks, I don't give a shit what they do with them, I have absolutely no interest in this whatsoever.

What else is there in the pipeline... Cheating, Market Value and Moderation apparently. Great, that's really going to give me something else to do isn't it.

The game is full of half arsed, half finished features like reward points, stadiums and CPU challenges which add absolutely sweet fuck all to the game.

Develop _things to do_ No one gives a crap about how Market Value is calculated. It's not even as though you can play in fun competitions due to this minor/major form rubbish which I have also been moaning about for probably going on 18 months now. I'm pretty sure the reason I started this blog was partially down to that.

I feel sorry for Ov in a way because he's spent a lot of time developing the game and listening to feedback for the whole thing to be ruined by the shitty ME. The new FAs work well (in general), things like player pools were cool and the injury system is a massive improvement. Well, the system is, having 5-6 players injured every fucking game isn't.... but I digress again.

But why was starting a new GW and the resultant economy effects not tested before the reset ? No new GW was run any further than half a season so no one ever saw what was going to happen to the economy, no one knew what would happen with inflation. Things like all the players becoming unlocked at the end of season 1 went unnoticed.

Why was no proper XFA structure put in place ? Some GWs are pretty good for this, but why was no specific XFA event organises appointed to create and run community competitions ? My other GW was a joke, it wasn't until I complained to support that they finally decided to start some, and even then the ones they did were shit, had stupid rules and were completely pointless due things like home playing rights being on in every competition.

What would make me play again ? FML + the old match engine we had before 1.3 (I'll pay everyone's sub for a month if the current one is even playable before the end of this year), a proper PvE structure, no major/minor form and someone with some sense appointed to be in charge of the XFA in every GW. I'd also remove half the mods for being complete clueless fuckwits (tmaz ones are all fine)

I'd also want a new GW, not because of the catching up thing, but because the database is fucked on most GWs now due every other player being an Olympic sprinter - again, raised at least 6 months ago about there being too many high paced regens. I noticed this in Miller well before the reset with just about every team filled with massively pacey youth players.

But the trouble with the beta is there's about 15 people who post on the forums. So you get about 3 people who think something is wrong, a couple who disagree and the rest don't have an opinion on that issue. So SI see 3 people moaning about something (433 anyone? Youth teams anyone?) then think it's not an issue. Then it gets rolled out in live and everyone is going mental about it while a few people are sitting there banging heads on desks thinking.... Well I did say....

There's simply no enjoyment in the game any more, there's no rhyme reason to results, there's no reason to do anything tactical. It's like noughts and crosses, where you know if you do the right thing first you will win every single time. There's absolutely no logic to anything you need to do. You just play 433, play narrow, get loads of pace and jumping and you win. Until completely out of the blue hit bad form and you simply cannot win under any circumstance.

I don't think the game is ever going to succeed. Considering what needs adding, and factoring in SI time, I reckon we are looking at another 18 months of development time. A lot of people say the game was more fun before the reset but if you think about it nothing much has changed. But I enjoyed it more too, why ? Probably because the game has always been fun for the minority, for the few teams at the top of the pile. In the new FML, this isn't even fun any more so even the top teams are bored. Since rankings were killed, since money making competitions were removed (and not filled by some decent XFA stuff in most GWs) there's nothing to do as a top team and making money is easy. Then you don't need any skill because you just do the 433 with pace. Right now I feel like I did before I said the game needed to be reset.... a few months later it was.

Anyway i've kinda quit several times before, but my main team subscription lapsed a couple of months back and my second account IS cancelled now, so that's it.

If I was given a free 12 month subscription right now, I wouldn't use it. I don't even want to play the game for free. It's a complete waste of time logging in, to do nothing, so you can get AI to play league games where the result will depend on which way the wind is blowing.

I could ramble on about this for about another 10,000 words but everyone has probably stopped reading by now.

If anyone still is reading now, every single thing i've moaned about on FML has become a big problem/issue a few months after I said it would. So if you want to make the game good by doing one thing, listen to me and.... Sort out PvE

Rage out.

Oh Shit!

2010-08-15T15:13:00.000-07:00

Wage auctions have gone epically bad and i've not really managed to sign anyone. I changed tact and went for players on the free agent list too but lost out on them too ! This wasn't especially helped by the fact I was away for the weekend and missed a couple of days of wage auctions either. I've punted in on a load of old free agents which should hopefully last a season or so and get me promoted.

I'd decided to configure email alerts for transfers and was checking these on the iphone while out with the GF. She was interested in knowing what I was doing, so I figured this it was about time to explain FML to her.

She was not impressed. I'm not allowed to play it any more, the other girls there were also deeply offended and they all seemed to have had some kind of bad boyfriend related FM experiences.

Wouldn't it be nice

2010-08-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Things seem pretty quiet it the world of FML of late.

The only hot topics seem to be the ongoing ME saga and the major/minor competition form seems to finally be getting some attention after I have spent the last year or so complaining about it !

Those issues aside there seems to be a general despondence from many of the long time FML'ers. I think in the past there was always a big issue to unite people, like the Gameworlds were dying, the game was going to die and various other big issues. I really don't think we have any massive issues like this any more. I think due to this people are starting to see the bigger picture and they are thinking "you know what ? I'm kind of bored"

Of course, many are bored because of ME related issues but it goes further than that and back to the age old issue of there not being a right lot to do. Other than a few daily things to do you are essentially limited to playing matches.

So what exactly is it people DO want from the game ? I'd have thought that PvE would have been of massive interest to people. A proper engaging PvE experience where there is always something for you to do when you want to do it and how you want to do it. Something to take away from the stress and worry of official league games.

But judging by the lack of interest in the what would you like to see in PvE thread, then maybe not ?

I don't get it, what do people want to do instead ? Play Poker ? Top Trumps ? What else is there to do in an football game other than play matches ? I really don't think an MMO can work without a proper PvE experience. I don't know of one which works on a purely PvP basis, although I guess there probably is one.

While i'm generalising a lot here, the FM titles have always tended to attract a different type of gamer to normal games. I always got the impression that many FM players never really played _other_ games. There's nothing wrong with this but I think it is giving people some kind of tunnel vision where they are just seeing PvP and live games as the be all and end all.

There's 24 hours in a day, there's people online from other timezones, many leagues only have ~40 games in a season.... That's a couple a day. What are the odds you are actually going to be able to PvP all of these games ? Are you going to come online and sit there for 12 hours waiting for the time the other manager comes on ?

Maybe you WOULD stay online for 12 hours if there was something else to do ? But I have a life and don't want to spend 12 hours online. Yes, because everyone who starts playing an MMO does it with the clear intention to spend their entire life on it don't they ? I remember about 10 years ago, being up at 3am in the morning fucking mining ore on Ultima Online. Why ? I have no idea at all why this seemed like a good idea. But alas, when I finally woke up the next day I logged on to wrestle come cows for several hours. During this time period I got PK'ed several times and had all my stuff stolen (ahh back when MMOs weren't fairly safe land... anyway I digress), met other players and had lots of fun.

I remember mining for a few hours when someone decided to come visit my mine with the intention of killing me. Unfortunately for him, i'd acquired some mage skills, trapped him in my mine with a wall and a blade spirit before teleporting away and watched the comedy from outside.

The point of this story ? I was online doing PvE and as a consequence I ended up in a PvP scenario, and the reason I was online to do the PvP was because of the PvE. Is this making sense yet ?

Anyway, reward point stuff and about a million other small things would be pretty easy to add into the game at some level i'd imagine but with FML progress is always slow. PvE would no doubt be a bigger job to properly but i'd imagine it would be entirely possibly for it to form the focus of a proper update. From the recent Korea announcement I get the impression that the FML development is RB doing something with youth academies while Ov does the rest of the coding.

Before the reset Ov seemed to be coding 24/7 so I expect he's back to sane hours these days which is making progress even slower. Will this ever change, will the team ever get better ? I read this probably little known and inactive blog a few months back which makes me wonder if it will?

Without Me

2010-08-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

The season wasn't going too badly in all honesty, then as I mentioned in my last post I was going to be away on Saturday.

On my return I found my AI had lost 8 games in a row which pretty much relegated me. My AI has something like a win ratio of 20% compared to my online win ratio of around 55%

If I had been there to play the games i'm convinced this wouldn't have happened. The other problem was I couldn't reselect my players returning from injury so I play around 6 games without my first choice players because they had been injured for one game.

We have match plans, but i'd much rather have some way to select your first choice 11 depending on certain criteria like fitness and the likes. So if a striker gets injured while i'm away I would be able to select who the AI should play instead of him. This is another reason why I don't like playing XFA competitions because it means I have to reshuffle my team for every game to put the injured players back in the starting 11. I'm not trying to sound lazy, but it causes issues if i'm offline because i'm not playing my best 11.

My match plans, while basic, essentially replicate what I do while online so I don't really understand why my AI is so terrible. I don't know why people always whine about losing to AI teams because they are so much easier to beat.

While typing this i've just logged in and found that technically i've not been relegated and there's a fair chance I would stay up if I win my last 2 games, especially as one is against another team in the relegation zone. Alas they both have AI rights over me and I was moaning about previously.... I had 3 MCs get injured and stick in the last couple of games and another is suspended. So once again, the game has decided to make every player in one position unavailable...

I'm not going to bother playing the games because it's false hope, once you are at this stage of the season the finishing positions are pretty much set in stone, predicted points is rarely wrong and things don't change much. I'll just hope for some AI ME magic as my AI must be due to actually win a game sometime soon.

Anyway the EFA season appears to have finished 3 days before the actual GW season ends so i'm going to take a break for a few days before seeing what I can do in wage auctions. As i'm on bad form now, I pretty much need to buy an entire new team, which I probably needed to do anyway.

So all in all a fairly enjoyable and eventful season. Two promotions and one relegation so i'm still up on where I started from.

On an unrelated note i've noticed that most of the active bloggers seem to be on GW
Turkyilmaz, with me, Jak, Rik and Thom. It's a bit of a strange GW compared to the others I have been in and seems fairly relaxed and sensible. It's not as busy as Butragueno was and there was always something mental going on there which I do kind of miss but it just seems a more mature crowd on Tmaz. I've not really got involved much in anything due to time restraints and a lack of interest in things these days though.

The mods seem good too compared to other GWs I have been in, probably the best in fact - I've not really seen them do anything or talk complete balls/provide misinformation. Being seen but not heard is the way to moderate... Other GWs take note.

We also have a GW blog which is worth checking out STUFFED and I wish them all best with it.

Everyone Hurts

2010-08-07T05:13:00.000-07:00

Seriously, this injury patch crap can just fuck right off now.

It happens EVERY single season. You have no injuries at all, then suddenly ALL of your fucking defence gets injured or ALL of your midfield gets injured. It's clearly been coded in to work this way or it's a bug because it happens way too often for it to be coincidence.

My DC goes off injured, I bring on a sub, he goes off injured. Both stick. Next game another 2 defenders go off injured.... There's strength in depth but what are you supposed to do when you have 6 strikers injured ? As I did last season..

But it just doesn't end there. My defence are all injured for 5 games, I only have 4 AI games to play today. I'm going to be away until Sunday night. So, this means that after 1 AI game tonight which will be played against me, some of my players will be back and fit. But I can't leave them selected because the AI will play them while they are half dead.

I wont be here to play 10 CPU games to get them fit either. Speaking of which, i've just had to play AN HOUR AND HALF of CPU games to get my midfielder back to match condition (he's still only on 96%) after he returned from injury.

Not that it made a fucking difference because my 4th defender went off injured in the 6th minute leaving me with no central defenders left, so on comes my right back and a short time later he's on a 5 and i'm losing.

I suspect this is going to destroy the season because i've got 6 AI games tonight and I wont be here and wont be able to select the right/fit players.

It's like the game FORCES you to be hardcore, because you have to be there all of the time but when you are on there's nothing to do except grind through CPU games to get fitness back up. Then you miss a single day and a month's worth of effort is ruined.

The game simply doesn't work, it's neither casual nor hardcore. If you want to get anywhere you HAVE to be online all the time, but there's no hardcore element to the game other than "sitting online"

I'm a believer

2010-08-03T14:34:00.001-07:00

So run #3 of my first season begins and I find myself in the Championship.

There's clubs here with average ability of 19 ! I'm screwed aren't I ?

Time to pray for some special ME magic to be on my side.

Time for Heroes

2010-08-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a long hard run in the EFA this time round. As the dust settles from run 2 I have 5 players out injured, no midfield left, suspensions all over the place and a lack of funds to bring in replacements.

Fortunately, I have won promotion to the Championship with a 3rd place finish ! I'm so proud of my team. I was the 4th lowest ability team in the division and could see a massive gulf in class in various games. Watching my team run round like headless chickens getting totally out classed, but they never gave up and grinded out the results when it mattered.

I stuck to my own advice and didn't panic in any games, just let the magic of the ME do its job. I was massively screwed over on several occasions with last minute equalisers and winners for the opposition all over the place but I had my fair share of ME bullshittery on my side too.

So i'm half way through the first season of my 3 season plan to win the Premiership and i'm 1 tier away. I really can't see me getting promoted for a 3rd time in a row next run though.

As i'm starting with half my team injured or suspended i'm going to have massive problems but i'm going to go for it, all out to win promotion. There's no other way, forget about the building for the future, everything is now, death or glory. If it's not looking good after a few games the plan is to avoid relegation, then buy a completely new team for season 2.

Never Lose Your Sense of Wonder

2010-07-30T15:08:00.000-07:00

hmm.

Not going especially well at the moment, went about 6 games without a win yesterday. I'm suffering from copious amounts of ME bullshittery at the moment. To be fair, I have one of the lowest abilities in my division so I should be losing games, but why do I have to dominate the games then lose ? Why do I have to lose in the 94th minute ? Why do I have to be completely robbed of every single result by some freak event ? Because that's what FML is about - destroying your soul.

Anyway, i've found a bit of time to write a blog post now. After my entire midfield got injured, it's time for my entire strike force to be injured. My main striker got injured for 1 single game so now it's going to take around 10 CPU games before he's in a state to play my last AI game of the day. Fun times. It's so demented.... your striker hurts his hand wanking, misses one game then needs another 10 games to get his fitness back... riiiiight, okay. Most annoyingly half the challenges go to bloody extra time too, meaning there's no fitness benefit to the extra 10 minutes worth of wasted life. Just come back to a CPU game where i've not watched anything whatsoever, to see 30 shots on goal against a level 1 team and i'm apparently not winning. gg wp.

Predicted points has me 2nd still despite the amount of times I have been robbed but i'm going to be away tomorrow so will miss all my AI games and wont have time to play 20+ CPU games to get fitness back. I just need to be in top 4 for promotion and then i'll be happy. I didn't expect to start this high in the FA so i'm a bit ahead of myself and had not planned for this, just need 2 more promotions to hit the big time.

Anyway, all these shitty CPU games has got me thinking again. There needs to be some better PvP experience in FML rather than playing these pointless challenges, not paying any attention to what is going on then waiting for the match to finish so my striker can gain an extra 1% fitness.

Lets get some real teams going on in the CPU leagues instead of "Random Uninteresting Town" Obviously the player licences are in place because we have the players, so I find it hard to believe that they don't have the rights to use real life teams.

So instead of playing boring CPU challenges why not let me enter my team in the English League starting in the Conference and working my way up, playing real teams like on FM ? Maybe I could go play in Spain or Italy instead, against the likes of AC Milan and Barcelona. Now you instantly have a great PvE experience and reason to stay on line longer.

So you could play a full season in your own time, play as few or as many games as you like against real life teams and work your way up into the Premiership to see how YOUR team competes against the real life big boys.

But would people be more interested in playing these games rather than the normal FA games ? Maybe, but lets say you can be challenged while playing these games (while not in DnD) and we can use SI's awesome new match recovery system to auto resume the PvE game when you have done with your live game.

Come on, even if for some reason you can't use real teams, just use real players and make some fake teams or something. There's about a million and one ways you could make this awesome.

Forget about youth academies and crap like this, it's just a yawnathon, sort out the PvE aspect so people have reason to stay online more.

On another side note, the forums are still fucking shit. I can't believe how badly they have managed to ruin the site. Every every time load a new thread you have to wait about 3 seconds before you can even start scrolling, then it's a massive lagathon just scrolling down the page. Honestly, I can't think of another website which is worse which I use. Even if I refresh the forum, then switch to another tab while it's refreshing, it lags out my entire browser....

Sort it out so I can moan about things more please because visiting the forum is now a massive pain in the arse.

Moving on Up

2010-07-26T12:06:00.001-07:00

The first run of the EFA is over and I have managed to take the title, so here's my first promotion after 6 days and only 3 more tiers to climb. (Yes, this is the full league and yes there are only 11 teams..)

It's funny that everyone seems to be complaining about the ME at the moment but i'm kind of happy with it from a selfish point of view because as long as you do a few things right then you generally win most of your games.

I'm especially annoyed with cup games right now though. We are told you only have minor and major form, but whatever controls results, call it form or something else (I like to call it bullshitery) My team has a complete inability to perform in any cup game.

It's such a joke, I play fine in league then as soon as a cup game comes up, no matter what strength the opposition, what the competition is or the venue. My team either don't turn up or I get super keepered and one shot wondered. Yet in the league I can do no wrong. I had exactly the same problem on my old GW with my Premiership team too.

I've played and watched far too many games to know this is happening and it's not my imagination. There's a distinct difference between how my team PLAYS - not necessarily the result, but what they do on the pitch in cup games compared to league games.

I already don't play any non major games due to the different form in those competitions but i'm thinking about asking to be withdrawn from the FA cup competitions next season too. All that happens is I get half my team injured and robbed by the result.

I'll leave the specific ME feedback to everyone else and stick with what I posted on here in February - "they have fixed the game but broke the ME"

Check pretty much anything I posted in February when I was still bothered/angry. Other than the outside the box corner, nothing has changed.

Fire

2010-07-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

Not much happening, had a request for a picture of my new striker so here he is:

I have had some funny old games today though. What kind of annoys me about FML is it totally refuses to let you lose in any kind of fair manner. How often have you played a game, been a bit better than the other team and won the game or vice versa? This barely ever happens, I don't think I could name more than about 1 game a season this occurs.

Lets take a game I played earlier. I'm playing an all youth team, i'm 3-0 down within about 15 minutes to the only 3 shots he has had on goal. This is annoying for two obvious reasons.

I say to myself, it doesn't matter, i'm going to win anyway. A short while later and following my own tactical advice, of course it's 3-3 now. I didn't need to do much, because you don't need to. So now we have a ridiculous comeback in play. Next thing is i'm hammering him off the field, 7 CCCS later and his GK who's on a 5.8 has suddenly become the reincarnation of Gordan Banks. This is annoying. Then he has a DC sent off. Good times a ahoy, he's offline, he's not got anyone in the middle of his defence, lets get the ball down here. Alas, this makes no difference whatsoever and he proceeds to start hammering me into the ground. This is annoying. I manage to hold on then win on penalties. But come on, why does every game have to be like this ?

I'm 3-0 up after about 20 minutes, i'm cruising, all my players are playing with confidence while the other team is looking angry, looking furious, making mistakes. But this doesn't matter, they are going to keep coming at me like a battering ram. It's 3-2 now, i'm holding on for dear life. I win, but again... come on ffs, just let me win a bloody game normally.

Every single game I have lost this season has a common theme.... yep, I conceded every single shot on target.

I'm playing in the GW Cup and I don't think i've made it past the 1st round once post reset. I'm 2-0 down after the only 2 shots he's had on goal. It's a tight match, this is okay, maybe it's not my day. But it can't just leave it at that can it ? Of course, not. I now have 3 midfielders injured. I now have a DC sent off, i'm now 3-0 down.

I just want games where one team is better than the other and wins the match...Normal games.... This actually does kind of happen a lot in foodball ya know.

Plus, what's with these injury patches ? Last season I went through a phase where I only got strikers injured having 5 out at one point. This season it's my mifield with one going off every bloody game. As soon as one comes back another two get kung fuud off the pitch.

Regardless, i'm top of the league so promotion should be on for the first EFA run.

Crazy Low Down Ways

2010-07-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

I'm sure by now people have realised I have many crazy theories and tend to act irrationally at times ;)

So yesterday, I lost my first game and decided I was in bad form and needed to do something about this. I remembered this quite late this afternoon, so logged on and headed of to the market place. About 5 minutes later I bought the first player I was offered for a transfer record of £2m. Remember this is my first full season so that is quite a lot, bringing my total spending to about £2.5m.

I decided what I needed to fix my bad form was a new striker. So I bought a winger. He can can also play up front though. He only has 11 finishing, like that matters! But he has an higher AF than any of my other players so it should provide a nice little CA boost to my squad.

4 games later, he has scored 6 goals, 1 assist and an average of 8.57 and things are back on track. My other striker has returned from injury so my strike force should be fairly handy at this level I reckon.

So I guess we will never know if I was in bad form, but another one of my 'crazy superstitions' has seemingly worked out quite well.

Whenever people complain about results on the forum and there's some kind of official response it often mentions that the average CA of teams is similar etc. So I reckon it's always useful to try and bump up your average CA in times of crisis.

In other good news I notice i'm not actually in the lowest tier of the FA. I guess because I won the Reception FA and gained a bit of rep I got placed a bit higher. This means I'm only in the 4th tier of the EFA, which runs 3 times per season.

So it's actually possible I could get to the Premiership in my first season. I reckon i'll settle for a position in the Championship though to be on the safe side. I've spunked my emergency transfer fund pretty early but my squad is big so I can cover injuries hopefully.

Retreat

2010-07-21T14:50:00.000-07:00

So erm, I started my campaign to win the Premier League in an existing GW within 3 seasons tonight.

It's bad news. Very bad.

I lost my first game to an all youth team who are 4 ability points below mine. Of course, I completely dominated the game, got super keepered and they scored with their only shots of the game.

But this is badness of epic proportions. It was a home game, my striker went off injured, it stuck and I was done over big style.

This means one thing and one thing only. I'm in bad form. There's no way out of this other than to buy a new team. One game played, but I already know it is all over unless I make massive changes. I need to spend several million to fix this otherwise I will be stuck in bad form for the rest of the season now. I can tell from just one single game this is going to happen, FML really is that predictable, i've seen this so many times.

Losing the first game, and a home game no less, is a complete and utter fucking disaster.

Finishing work early tomorrow, so I may be able to fix this yet. I saved a couple of million in case this happened so I need to bring in some big players before I can play another game.

Bad times... bad times indeed.

Orange Crush

2010-07-17T02:53:00.000-07:00

I've been avoiding this for a while because I reckon anyone who actually reads my blog will already know all of this, but seen as the orange arrows of doom debate rages onwards I thought I may as well.

Short Version

Does your player have orange arrows ? Ignore them, there is no problem here.

Long Version
(yeah i'm copying and pasting some bits of this from what i've wrote before)

Lets talk about player development first and how it works.

Potential Ability (PA) – Every player in the database has PA between 1-200 and a Current Ability (CA) between 1 and their PA level. PA does not change and if a player’s CA hits their PA then they will have become as good as they possibly can. As an example, Cristiano Ronaldo will have a PA around 195 and his CA will be around 190 as he is a world class player at his peak. On the other hand a player like Toni Kroos may have a PA of 170-190 but a CA of 145 because he has not hit his peak yet.

As attributes increase so does a player's CA, once all the PA points are used up then a player will have peaked and no more progression is possible.

Once a player has reached neared CA, this is when you usually start to see orange arrows. Players on FML are actually on training schedules behind the scenes. I don't know how these are set up but I suspect they are set to be conservative and generic and don't shape players as well as you can on the FM series.

So even when a player has reached his potential ability, he will continue to 'develop', so a striker is probably still training something like passing in the background and one day he's learnt to pass a bit better so passing increases. But he doesn't have any ability points left to learn this new passing ability, so something else goes down a little bit to free up the points.

This is known as attribute bounce. Now, I can understand why people might be a little bit confused why a striker is losing something such as composure to get better at dribbling. But the attribute change is tiny ! It's NOT going to change how that player performs on the pitch to any noticeable extent. If you have a striker with 16 finishing and it's gone down by 0.04, he has lost 0.25% of his finishing ability. Think about that, how is that going to change his performance ? erm, it's not ! Things such as morale, home advantage, tactics and about a dozen other things influence how these attributes interact with the ME to a much larger extent.

Orange arrows are one of the most useful tools you have as a manager. Once you see them starting to appear you know your player isn't going to get much better so you can make a decision on whether you want to keep him, knowing he wont get much better, or whether you want to move him on and bring someone better in. It looks like we are actually going to lose this knowledge due to people moaning about arrows now.

Before we had orange arrows and just red arrows, it used to work like this:

Attributes are displayed in the 1-20 range on the screen they are actually stored in the 1-10,000 range behind the scenes to give extra accuracy during progression. Because they are rounded down to be displayed a small change behind the scenes can manifest itself as a fairly big change on the screen. For example a player with 19 for finishing on the screen may have 9,050 behind the scenes. If they then drop to 8,950 during processing this is only a drop of 1 or 2% however on the screen it is the difference between 18 and 19 and so a red arrow is displayed and it looks like a drop of 5%. Rest assured though that for all processing the 'real' figure is used.

The skills have a 5% bonus per level, so Coaching 5 will boost positive changes by 25% - what this means is that if, behind the scenes in the 1-10,000 range, a player's finishing increases by 400 points it will actually increase by 500 points (the 400 plus the 25% boost.) If the player doesn't improve though the skill won't make him improve.

So when orange arrows were introduced we started to see these micro changes instead.

The other thing people are usually whining about is how strikers are losing something like finishing to gain tackling. This is not what is happening. He is losing finishing to bounce other attributes around maybe, but not to gain attributes like tackling.

The most important thing to understand is attributes are weighted so an important attribute costs more CA points than an unimportant one and some don’t cost anything at all!

Put simply physical attributes are generally the most costly. Pace and acceleration are the biggest cost for most players. Every wondered why so many medium potential youth players with high pace and acceleration are rubbish or not developing? The answer is because they have used up all their potential by having high pace because it is such a costly attribute to possess. So if you see a low potential player who has very high physical attributes then his career is over – that’s it folks, he has nothing left in him, he will not get much better. Most physical attributes are very costly because they are important to just about every position on the pitch.

The next thing to realise is that attributes are weighted depending on a player’s position. So it will cost a lot of CA points for a striker to increase his finishing, it might not cost as much for a winger to gain finishing and for a defender ? It’s free!

If a player gains an attribute which is not linked to his position then it doesn’t cost anything, no CA points, nothing!

I can’t confirm the accurate of this page but I reckon it’s about right:
http://koti.mbnet.fi/fmr2008/freeattributes.html

So what about high potential youths with orange arrows ? I'd need to see the players really, but there could be numerous reasons. The most likely is your JP is wrong or you are over estimating it. A 4* player might not actually have that high a PA, i'm not sure what the ranges are in all honesty but i'd guess what you see as a 4* could easily weigh in at about 130CA. Now if he has high physical attributes, he's used a crap load of PA points just by having those - pace, acceleration, jumping etc... So, he can't get any better!!

There's very very few super world class players in the database that have enough PA to sustain mega attributes all round. I think there are only 10 players in the FM10 database who are -10s. (170-200) CA. Think about this, we know the integrity of the database is maintained, so it will only ever generate enough high potential players to remain in line with what it started with, and then you have to wait for those to retire.

There's other factors too like, if you come across a youth player who is competent in several different positions you need to be wary again. It actually uses up CA points just to be able to play in all those positions!

If these points have been used up by being able to play many positions, it may mean less green arrows. There is a second huge impact to this too because you are losing lots of free attribute potential. Crossing for a MC is free, Crossing for a ML/R is not free. So if you find a player who can play MC RLC and you intend to use him in MC, bear in mind he has to use CA points for ‘pay’ for his crossing ability which may mean less potential to develop something such as passing.

Do you really think all 5* players are superstars ? Dream on. They are probably players you would associate with mid table Premier League teams in the majority of cases.

Finally, why is this a problem now ? It has always happened ! Ever since FML has existed, this has happened. It is not new.

Low and Behold

2010-07-14T15:09:00.000-07:00

So my first half season has finished in Turk.

Pretty much business as usual then ! I couldn't face playing my last couple of games after the shit storm the ME was throwing at me. I think I literally had 2 strikers injured every single game for my last 8 matches in a row. Less said about the game where I had 8 CCCS the better. I had about 5 strikers out at one point along with half of my midfield ! Funny thing was I had no injuries all season prior to this and have pretty much blitzed physio 3. With the season drawing to a close, I couldn't see any point bringing in fresh faces so started games with 2 players on the bench.

It's quite comical with poorer players, the games don't actually look any different to when you are playing in a top tier. The only difference is you have about a million more chances, and miss them all.

I'd picked up a 32 year old striker who was pretty hot in my initial squad. He was my money man and banged in 30 goals in 34 games for me, bringing the title home. Alas, he was dying badly and his physicals were taking a turn for the worse.

Rather inconveniently, due to my striker crisis, but also fortuitously, someone took up the £1m auto accept I had set on him. Rule 1 of FML - No matter how stupid you are, there is always someone even more stupid ;) So he won me the title and brought me in about £800k pure profit, not including prize money.

This leaves me with a rather healthy looking £3.4m projected to spend in wage auctions to build a squad to win the lower tiers. The aim is still to win a top tier title within 3 seasons. Obviously the last couple of weeks don't count, so it's 3 seasons from the start of next. I reckon the EFA offers my best chance of progression at this stage, so i'm going to head off there and battle my way up the leagues.

I'm tempted not to bother learning any more skills as I don't think there's much point, i've already got pretty much all I need.

The only problem is i've actually found a girl who is even more insane than me, so i'm going to be busy most of the weekend while wage auctions are on so squad building could be problematic.

As for T-Bag Town, not even logged in to see where I finished, I suspect my AI didn't do me proud as I didn't set the match plans to activate.

Stayin' Alive

2010-07-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

So here's another tactical insight for the night, seen as i'm still feeling generous.

What to do in games you are losing ? What to do in games you are playing really bad in ?

First off, use the tactical changes I have suggested in my recent post.

But, the main thing you should do to comeback and win a game is - nothing. The ME is that cool. There is a kind of logic to it I suppose. Do not panic, have supreme confidence you are going to win the game no matter what the score is, i've seen it all on FML, anything is possible.

Do not go attacking.
Do not make pointless subs.
Even consider going more defensive - as in playing narrower, FML makes that much sense!

Look back at your recent results, how many games involved a clean sheet? FML doesn't like clean sheets. You are more than likely going to score a goal, once you get one, the flood gates will probably open.

For no apparent reason, the losing team always seems to get a massive boost around the 50th minute regardless of what player confidence is doing. This is the time you are likely to score and should exploit this, once one goes in your team will keep hammering forward without you having to change a single thing. You just need to wait for this period of the game and don't make things worse prior to this.

At half time, you can sub off one player who is averaging <5.x. Do not sub defenders, do no bother subbing your DM, NEVER sub your money man striker. Do not sub your corner taker (assuming you have a good one)

If you have had lots of long shots, make sure you go turn them onto rarely in all individual player instructions.

Lets take some examples.

Game #1 - It's 1-1, i'm away from home, i'm playing awful. I've made all my tactical changes and some sensible subs but nothing has changed, nothing is working. My main striker is having a mare, i've had players off injured and i'm struggling. Kept calm, stayed on standard strategy, play narrow, pump ball into box. Then it comes, it always comes... 80th minute they get a player sent off. Your time is now. Take off narrow and go attacking, score 2 goals in 4 minutes and the game is won. Wait for the opportunity, there's always an opportunity, then exploit it.

Game #2 - I'm away to 3rd position, who look like a strong team. I'm 2-0 down and generally getting a pasting. I've done my normal tactical changes but nothing else. 70th minute I get my goal, you always get a goal, FML doesn't like clean sheets. Do nothing, 86th minute I equalise. I know the game is now won as a 93rd minute corner goes in.

Obviously this is less likely to work if you are about 4-0 down, but if you are playing my away tactics then that isn't likely to happen.

I'd suggest having some inspiring mp3s to listen to at the time.

Mitigate comebacks against yourself by playing as I have suggested previously.

So in summary, don't spunk your load too early. Just sit back, wait, and the wonder which is the ME will do most of the work for you. Don't lose games by making pointless tactical changes, don't bother going attacking unless it is appropriate.

Going Missing

2010-07-11T14:58:00.000-07:00

I've quite possibly had the most bizarre weekend of my entire life, needless to say it's going to result in less FML time.

Main account remains cancelled, T-Bag Town is due to expire very shortly... The end of an era :(

Anyway, I am still "on a mission" to win the Premier League in 3 seasons with a new account with zero skills.

Have you read my last post yet ?

I signed a team as per my attribute templates, and while I have been away my AI has managed to play 14 games, not lost a single one and of course i'm sitting pretty at the top of the Reception FA while sitting 2nd in the bronze rankings. I haven't set up any match plans, I haven't done anything except sign a team as per what i've been banging on about for several months. I've not even bothered learning any new skills for the last few days.

It's too easy.... Game on, the Premiership title is calling. The problem is still going to be how much time I have available to do this!

Is it 'cos i'm cool

2010-07-09T14:53:00.000-07:00

Oh well, seen as I have given up, here it is, how to be as awesome as me.

This is a somewhat an amalgamation of a previous post, combined with other stuff I have learnt plus some new stuff, but here it is:

How to win stuff:

The Formation

Set up a simple 4-3-3. You can use the tactics creator to do this. You want to set it to be more fluid, standard strategy. Passing should be set to more direct and roaming set to stick to position.

The Tactics

Set all individual long shots to rarely. If you have a midfielder with especially good long shots you may want to allow one or two players to be set to sometimes.

Set corner aim to far post. You want to be taking inswinging corners so a corner taker for the left foot and one for the right would be useful.

You want your best header on attack far post and your second best header on challenge GK (both of these must be DCs, it rarely works with other players) and a third player on near post flick, a defender isn’t essential for this. Ensure you have plenty of players back so you don't get caught on the break - at least 3.

Set free kick aim to best header

For defending corners, the default instructions actually work fine most of the time, just ensure you that you don’t have more than one player forward when defending. You can use mark specific on opposition instructions if there’s an especially problematic player.

The Players

For all players you should avoid anyone with stamina below 14, you can compromise on DCs.

Technical and mental attributes are not especially important, it's all about the physicals, you want players with very strong physical attributes.

Fullbacks should have the following attributes. Pace & Acceleration must be at least 16 (the higher the better) and tackling around 13+ will do. Nothing else really matters but other defensive attributes are useful, but mainly look for the physicals. Jumping will help improve average ratings but it’s not actually that essential for a decent full back.

Central Defence - Heading/Jumping - at least 17/17, this is important for corners. Pace & Acceleration should be at least 12. (higher is preferable but hard to find on a budget) Strength is probably the next most important thing followed by tackling and marking but they are of less importance. Filter on heading/jumping at 17 and tackling 14 then pick the best. Your best defender needs to be your corner banger, he needs to be a good quality DC with jumping ability. You can compromise with any old crap for the 2nd DC as long as they have heading, jumping and decent physicals in other areas.

FCC - This is your money man. This needs to be your best player, he must have pace & acceleration at least 16+ (preferably higher) with strong dribbling ability. Finishing, composure etc are not important although they are obviously desirable. Also look for flair and off the ball. The faster and strong the better, this is the key. Remember, this is the player you need to break the bank for, this is the man that is going to win you games, don’t get it wrong.

Forwards, right and left - Pay attention to the footedness of the players, you want to ensure you have a left and right footer if possible. You can sometimes find players who are massively right footed who can play fine on the left, but there aappears to be absolutely no rhyme or reason to why some players can do it and others can’t. Experiment, chop and change until you find someone who can play on the left if they are not left footed. Again, pace & acceleration is required here, you want 17/17 ideally with good dribbling attribute. Nothing else really matters but again, finishing and the likes are desirable.

Midfield - Doesn't really seem to make much difference what you do here. Just go for the physicals, as strong as possible. You obviously want to be looking for good passers and those with beneficial midfield attributes, dribbling is beneficial too. You want a DM in the middle then and at least one decent AMC on one of the sides. I've always been a bit crap at finding midfield players tbh, what i'm trying to say is go for someone who's reasonable in midfield but has very strong physicals.

Make sure one of the above players has at least 17 in corner taking and ideally you need someone who can take a free kick.

You should pick a captain who has at least 16 in influence AND is who is going to average high most games. So don’t pick some guff striker as he’s likely to be inconsistent. A defender or a top MC is a good choice usually.

Duck N Dive

Also known as DnD ;) Ok something you need to understand now. The quality of your team and tactics actually has very little bearing on the result at all. This is absolutely crucial, you must manage your form. It's all about the form.

Therefore you need to ensure you have good form and mitigate any potential dips. You have a massive advantage in home games so you need to start your league campaign by playing a weak team at home to get a strong result. Pick your games carefully, you ideally want to play as many home games, against weak teams, as possible to start you off. It doesn't matter if you leave yourself with a load of away games as you will be on top form by then.

I really can’t stress this enough. This may require you to be a massive arse, someone challenged you to a game, is it away? Does it look tough ? Start a CPU game to avoid losing AI rights. Sit in DND and check the league table/online managers and target the weak teams, target the home games against the weak teams. Get at least 4-5 games in against teams you are fairly sure you can beat. Spotted a manager who is 'away' ? Get him challenged if it's green balled to make sure you win AI then play him while he's offline.

Hopefully you have now won all of your early home games, now in top form. You are almost unbeatable so challenge the good teams now ! If you go more than 2 games without winning - be that a draw or a loss. STOP !!!!!! Get yourself on DND. Stop what you are doing, you are about to enter bad form. You need to find someone bad to play or someone suffering injuries, someone else bad form. Duck in and out of DND and snipe your targets, you MUST get yourself back to winning ways or you are screwed.

If you are serious about this, you need to aim for 0% AI. Any game played against your AI is a serious disadvantage as you wont be able to deploy the correct tactical changes in game. You may need to be an arse again here. Take note of what time AI is awarded, make sure you are online and auto start as soon as possible. If you have one of those pesky managers who are constantly starting AI games, then add them as a friend and sit there ready to pounce as soon as you see their match has finished. Don't forget to remove them and neg feedback them afterwards ;)

Pay attention to who is injured and suspended for your team, try and play home games when you have players missing and try and snipe the better teams when they are having injury problems.

Matches

So what to do in matches ? This is quite key and one of the reasons why you need to play your games because you can’t replicate much of this with match plans.

Once you have submitted your team, do not click kick off, instead wait for the opposition manager to submit their team. Now you need to set opposition instructions and show every offensive opposition player onto their weaker foot. This is a right ballache, but do it. I don’t think many people actually do this but it helps massively. In a 433 just the strikers will do and any dangerous midfielders, in a 442 you want the strikers and wingers. Just use common sense – but don’t forget to do it, every game!

Home Games

Due to the strength of home form, you should be looking to win every single home game regardless of the strength of the opponent. Start the match doing show opposition onto weaker foot and shout run at defence. If you are not dominating after 10 minutes, so you haven’t had many shots, they have had too many shots, whack on hassle opponents. Is it still going bad ? Shout play narrower. Is it still going bad ? Drop your MC into DMC. Is it still going bad ? Replace run at defence with ump ball into the box if your players are not getting enough space. Have you had lots of shots but haven’t scored ? Is your FCC averaging badly ? Rotate him with one who is averaging higher. Is it still going bad ? You’re doing it wrong! You can look to replace a striker at HT if they are averaging <6.00 but don’t bother with other positions.

Away Games

Okay, you are not trying to win these games, you are trying not to lose them. A draw is a result. You need to stifle play, stop them playing, then you will hopefully win the game on the counter.

Show players onto weaker foot (never forget this!!) Start the game with hassle opponents and play narrower.

Watch the game, are you getting space ? Add in run at defence. Is it going bad ? Use pump ball into box instead. Consider dropping your MC back into DMC if needs be. It doesn’t actually seem to matter if they can’t play DMC or not.

General

Circa 60th minute you need to start looking to make your substitutions. Have you ignored my earlier advice and bought some low stamina players ? They need taking off about now so you can continue pressing and pressuring. Unless they are playing exceptionally well consider replacing them. Replace any strikers who are not contributing much, except your money man – you NEVER sub your money man no matter what his average rating is.

Always leave one sub unused in case you get an injury. You should only use your final sub if you are desperate.

Regardless of venue, if you are winning past the 60th minute and the other team is starting to come into the game more, shout play narrower. You can continue attacking just fine with this shout but it stifles them.

If you are dominating the game but not winning past 60th minute go to control strategy, you can leave play narrower on, I know this is counter intuitive If you are still not winning go attacking 75th minute and overload from about 85 minutes. But he careful, only use this in games where you are the better team.

If it gets to the 75th+ minute and you have clearly won the game, then take of hassle opponents to reduce the risk of injury.

Some games you are just going to lose, accept it. Don’t go all out and suffer a bigger loss than you need to. It hurts form and morale. Most of the time you can just hang tight anyway, if you are on good form you are pretty much unbeatable anyway and will score a last second equaliser or some crap.

Use youth or CPU games to increase condition after a player comes back from injury, don't play any games until they are 96%+ fit. Even if it is a senior player, a youth game magically increase the condition of a player returning from injury.

Morale seems to randomly increase about 10 minutes after playing a match regardless of whether you won it or not, so consider waiting a short while before jumping into the next match.

Final thoughts

Player ability doesn’t really count for much, i’ve consistently being one of the lower ability teams in every league that I have played in and consistently finished at or near the top. You don’t need good players, you don’t need expensive players, you need the RIGHT players, you need the right blend and that’s it.

If the above doesn’t work, then you have the wrong players.

Had Enough

2010-07-08T13:23:00.001-07:00

Game over people. Main account is cancelled.

Completely fed up. The key to being successful at FML is to dedicate a huge amount of time to being online, doing nothing.

This season I had to move FA as I was going to be away for 5 days so obviously when I come back i've not really got AI over anyone and in the traditional FA there's only few games a day. So you log on, play those then there's no reason to stay on so you log off, which means you lose AI to rest of your games and there's no reason to log on again!

So this season i'm not going to win the league due to the fact i've lost AI to too many teams and AGAIN due to not being able to beat bottom of the league in utterly farcical games. Results versus bottom of the league have decided every single title in every single season so far.

Still i've won 4 top tier FA leagues and runners up twice and should get runners up again this season so i've done decent enough without any good players. But it's "too easy" i'm just bored. There's absolutely no skill to the game any more because of the state of the ME. There's absolutely no sign of any change or even admission of a problem with it.

It's so simple, jumping, pace, acceleration, 433, play narrow, set up set pieces, make sure you don't lose AI = win the league. I'm just bored of doing the same thing every single game because so little else works. But it actually takes a lot of time and effort to make sure you win AI to every game and to make sure you make all the correct tactical changes. It's a grind.

I was hoping for a fun busy engaging environment, but I can't actually play in the XFA due to this competition form crap. What's the point in playing in those games when my form is completely different to that of my FA form ? When I win every FA game but simply can't string two passes together in the XFA ? I'd enter every competition under the sun if I knew my team wasn't going to draw every game because I have bad minor form. Aside from this there isn't really any decent competitions to enter if you discount the quick plays ! I did mail a request a while back but never even got a response.

So i'm stuck, having to be on 6 hours a day so I can win the league, to simply play a couple of games a day. What am I doing ??

I'm not so fussed about all these youth teams doing so well. Well, I was when I was complaining about it January, only to be told the average CA of my team was only 20 points higher. I believe I said I could accept no possible explanation for losing to a team of 16 year olds.

To be honest there's not a lot wrong with the game now, it just discourages you from playing games due to the form crap and there's nothing else to do instead, no decent PvE or anything and most of my friends have already given up.

But do you know what the final straw has been ? The way they have fucked up the forums.... It just demonstrates the amazing ability SI have to take something which is good and mess it up.

I've still got the second sub I took out last week, so i'm going to carry on with that casually for now, as I reckon it might be fun bringing up a team through the lower divisions. But I suspect I will suffer the problems outlined above as in not being on enough to win AI.

On a Mission

2010-07-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

So the main account moved to the to the Traditional FA while I was away for a while, so it's like a couple of games a day.

So I decided to crank up a second account in one of the launch GWs, so I find my self in Turkyimaz (I think)

Signed up an initial squad as per my attribute templates, loads of choice and didn't really need to compromise in any area. Duplicated the tactics from my my main team, played a few games, looking good.

The mission is, win the Premier League within 3 seasons. This will most likely require the EFA for quick progression and perhaps some strategy FA hopping. I reckon I could easily win the 3rd tier of an FA with the squad i've got now in all honesty.

But i'm projected £1.7m already and wage auctions are coming up before the season starts ! I can't see how this can possibly go wrong, I should easily be able to put together a Championship quality squad if I have the time.

I've created a new account too, so no skills. This can't catch up sentiment is bollocks, skills stuff is bollocks. Premiership Champions within 3 seasons, it's happening. Anyone want to take the bet I wont do it ?

I'm Alright Me

2010-07-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

I have returned, from the greatest week ever, so there's not likely to be any rage for a while. I wasn't even feeling mad when I logged in expecting to find my team had lost every game while I was away. In a strange turn of events, they had actually won every single game. I've not got AI over anyone but my match plans seem to be working and i'm just winning them all so it seems I don't really need to play.

Anyway, I have to laugh. Looking everyone who is still complaining about the ME pretty much everywhere, but what about me ? The whole reason I created this blog in the first place, and the reason I revived it was due to my hatred of the ME. Well, actually, i'm loving it ! I can't seem to lose.

But looking at the complaints, it's all stuff myself and others were complaining about over six months ago on the beta forum. Look back to my old posts on here in February and I was complaining about youth teams being too good, corner goals, random results,433, while others had raised very valid concerns about physical attributes.

After it taking around 2 months to get the outside the corner box goal being acknowledged as a bug and then only when it came up in FM10 (There would have been outcry if this went live) I realised giving ME feedback was actually completely pointless. It seems to be deemed that results on FM10 make sense therefore it must be completely fine for FML when totally different circumstances occur.

How many teams on FM10 have players with all high jumping ? All youth teams ? All playing 433 etc ? It doesn't happen...

So anyway, I took everything that I had learnt, that I and others had feedback, that was completely ignored and used it to my advantage to create a nice little team. To be fair I don't have all high jumpers or anything, but I coped just fine with a 16k DC in defence for 4 seasons and funnily enough he's STILL better than my £2m DC. Not lost a game again all season yet, P13 W12 D1 with a very average team and only one big star player.

Seriously, don't hold your breath waiting for things to be fixed, i've been waiting 6 months. If you can't beat them.... join them, win some games and enjoy :) I'm really hoping they DON'T fix the ME! This is like when I had my 460 all over again, the ME was shit but I couldn't lose apart from when I got BSed.

I'm pretty sure I have this cracked and i'd post up a total guide if I had time but people will no doubt moan when it doesn't work for them.

22 days left on my subscription, I think I probably will renew for a while as winning is always fun.

Holiday

2010-06-21T15:32:00.000-07:00

Oh, i'm rather excited, Wednesday at 1am I begin my adventure to Glastonbury. The eagled eyed have probably noticed all my blog titles are song names, I likes my music. Alas the line up is shit, but that's not what it's about... I'm concerned how my car is going to cope with the 300 cans which are currently loaded...

Anyway, in anticipation of this event I have moved FA. I went to the easiest looking FA, why wouldn't I ? With one problem, my main rival who panned me in the last game of the season to take EFA run 3 has also moved there ! But other than him, it's still the easiest FA and he's moved because he's going to be offline most of the season, so I figured second place would do, and hopefully his AI is as shit as mine.

But things are not looking so good as someone has made the AI land in a sensible manner finally. I'm going to miss about 8-10 games, which I can guarantee my AI will lose every single game.

Looking at overall club ability i'm still way behind everyone else, but i've played a few games and of course, won them with ease. I'm pretty sure i've actually cracked the ME again, i've posted about it on here before but I think i've narrowed it down to something specific which is allowing me to beat far superior teams and it's something which I can't replicate in AI games unfortunately.

It's the only explanation, and i'm not going into it again and it could just be one of my myths but I think this is a serious edge I have which no one else is doing. Read up on my away tactics post if you want more info!

Anyway, I might be back on Monday if I make it through the week :D I'll no doubt return to find myself bottom of the table and the season in ruins.

Eat The Rich

2010-06-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

Wages are pretty crazy these days eh ? I have probably bid on around 35 players so far in wage auctions and won about 4 of them, having been around 75% under the final wage in some. Terribly average youth players going for 16k wages and the like, crazy stuff. Or is it ?

Partially because I was drunk, and probably more likely related to the fact i'm slightly mad I decided to join the party. I bid 22k wages on an 18 year old with an AF of 18k, who I suspect is probably around 3* potential. However, he has awesome physicals (probably nearly peaked) 18 jumping and a senior average of 7.49. So as long as the ME update doesn't screw me over I know he can slot into the first team no problems. Cost wise, 22*28 - £616k + AF = £634k for the season. Is it that daft now ? I suspect he would easily sell for that in a private transfer.

With that in mind it seems entirely sensible to be paying crazy wages in off season auctions when players cost so much on the open market. Alas, i'm still not being quite crazy enough it seems. I've bid £50k, 60k, more on 30 year old defenders and lost out, I simply can't get any bloody players in ! For the first time ever i'm classed as a rich club but I just cannot buy anyone, because being classed as "rich" by the game, in the current climate, means you can afford one average player.

So i've changed tactic and started randomly bidding on players I don't want and have no intention of keeping so I can sell them once tax has gone. £22k AF players have MV of £500k + ! I smell some profit here.

Plus I need to move out of the EFA for a season as i'm going to be offline for a week, so I may as well try and bring some of my younger players through. I should have enough for a top half finish in the premiership still, and for the first time ever i'm not actually playing to win the thing ! Although, depending what the ME update does, it's still possible I can manage it.

I'm still projected a fair whack of profit tax, so for the first time ever I might actually plan for the future and punt some more cash into the stadium. I'll no doubt spunk it all on some player 10 minutes before the season starts like.

Most of my players have orange arrows of death though !! Take Sir Lavezzi, my goal a game striker, he's lost 0.12 dribbling, or 0.75% of his dribbling ability. OH WHAT AM I TO DO, HE'S GOING TO BE SHIT NOW! Get a grip.

Eat My Goal

2010-06-19T06:28:00.001-07:00

Another 3D vid:

Getting Better

2010-06-18T14:11:00.000-07:00

I did post a preview of 3D about an hour after it was released before deleting it when I realised I wasn't supposed to, but I deleted the video files afterwards then couldn't be bothered.

It seems SI have posted a preview in somewhat questionable quality so I've decided to do another without the drunken commentary ramblings. Should be available in "HD"

Boulevard Of Broken Dreams

2010-06-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

Everyone seems pretty queit in the blogosphere of late, gameworldone seems dead and even the forums seem fairly placid of late (other than the utterly ridiculous complaining about orange arrows thread)

I'm not really sure if this is a good thing or not ? As Thom on Los Elephants has posted before, FML seems to be very much bandwagon jumping with everyone unhappy with the same issues at the same time, except we haven't had a wagon of late. It does seem very much a mood game where sections of the community seem to be feeling the same about things at the time like me and Jak seem to have become fed up at the same time.

Anyway, i've had a fairly good season I guess, but i'm gutted, I honestly am. I won the first 2 runs of the EFA and in the second instance I beat off the team with 400k or so wages sporting the likes of Lukaku and co. Third run I was well on course to do it again, easily clear at the top of the table and he had half his team injured.

I just needed to win the last few games then boom, hammered by a poor team, boom half my team injured. So it comes down to the last game, against 2nd place. I'm 2 points clear and all I need is a draw to take my 3rd league title in a row.

67% possession or so in the first 20 minutes, a dozen or so shots for me. Alas, he's had 3 shots, i'm 3-0 down and a 16 year old sub with a broken foot has scored a hatrick (i'm not joking) The game ends with a club record defeat of 5-0 even though he only had about 7 shots all game. I'm shocked and embarrassed by this, I really am... there was literally nothing I could do. So I finished 1st, 1st and 2nd, by a single measly point :(

I've been moaning about being broke for the last 3 months, but as I suspected I managed to pull some funds together as the season ended. I'm now classed as a rich club with around £5m cash or so and a couple more players I want to sell yet. Alas this came at the expense of selling much of my youth team but I'm struggling to see anyone with any value in wage auctions or transfer auctions though so i'm not sure if i'm going to end up getting many new players. Need some movement before the tax man comes in to steal my profits.

Funny thing is, my £1 DC with 16k AF is still easily cutting it at the top level! But who knows what the new ME will bring?

Finally punted up a new stand but it's going to be essentially next season before that is finished.

I'm going to be on holiday for a week or so just as the season starts next week (Gastonbury!) so I think I will have to leave the EFA because I will no doubt come back to find my AI has lost every game and I could be stuck in bad form indefinitely.

Nowt much else happening i'm afraid.

Sale of the Century

2010-06-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

Run 3 of the EFA has started well, played 7, won 7. Good times, roll up to bottom of the league and before I know it i'm 3-0 down, but we know shit like this is to be expected by now.

Anyway, I have problems. One of my youths was wanting a £200 pay rise, not bad, I think he's worth that, bank veto on the extend contract. Quite possibly related to the new update and the overdraft changes as I was only projected -89k or something.

Meanwhile, i'm looking at a player I sold for £30k in season 1. He was a decent potential player, but he was shit, his attributes meant he would never become a decent player so I got rid because £30k was a lot of cash in season 1. Anyway, he's now worth £2.4m - he's still complete shit, but £2.4m !! That could have solved all of my problems.

With that in mind, I decided on my new strategy. I need money, I need it now, I need to expand the stadium and maintain a team which is going to win the league again next season. So I figured it was time to sell my entire youth team. I think I actually did this at the exact same time in FML v1 back on St John, and I made naff all cash out of it on that occasion.

I've decided to keep the better players who I use in the first team and the rest haven't been given a game in the seniors yet so their AFs/MVs are still pretty low so i'm not expecting mega bucks. But I reckon I should be able generate £2-3m plus a senior I want to shift should net me around £5m in total. If I don't generate enough cash then the others will have to go too.

No doubt in a few seasons time, like what happened above above, like what happened in my previous GW, like what common sense tells me, all my youths will be worth a lot more money in a few seasons time and piss me off on a regular basis by outplaying me.

But as per my total inability to see anything past the next result I need to improve the team, I simply cannot accept defeat next season.

In other news I have gone from having barely any injuries at all to suddenly having 5 midfielders unavailable with my first ever training injury in the middle of this mess. Step up my youth team, most of whom are currently in auction!

This is Hardcore

2010-06-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

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 ;)

The State of Things

2010-06-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry, things have been a bit dull round here of late. I don't really have too much to moan about at present and there's not really anything I can be bothered putting the energy into ranting about right now.

The second run of the EFA finished last night with a rather tense and difficult finish. Had to stay up rather late to catch my last AI game as it was of vital importance after drawing with my title rival. Fortunately I won and took the league title but just 2 points ! So two EFA titles in the last two weeks for me, which is pretty good going and I assume this has sealed Premiership status for next season.

It's especially pleasing as I moved my captain on without replacing him and was hit by quite a lot of injuries this time round.

But I was chatting to my league rival who has a team far better than mine and he was telling me he was projected £13.4m. In contrast despite winning season 1 qualifying, finishing 1st, 2nd and 3rd in the second season and winning the first 2 runs far in season 3, i'm projected... £300k. I don't have especially high wages and haven't really made any huge transfer bids.

My mate explained it quite well when he said "you have made the mistake of buying good players who can win games" and in all seriousness, he is right ! My strategy of creating a team to win games will backfire now because I am unable to afford to strengthen my squad to compete with the teams that have £13m from their transfer dealings.

But that's the way I roll, I live by the next game and don't plan much further ahead than that! Take when my MC broke his leg due to Marc Duffy accidentally resetting the server, I could have got by for the second run without him and probably finished 2nd, but no, I went out and spent every penny I had to buy a replacement so make sure results didn't suffer too much. Bear in mind I still can't afford to turn my auto extends on at this point in time!

Maybe i'm stupid, I don't know... I reckon about 75% of my time playing FML my bank balance has been in the red. I'm constantly fighting fires and running away from the bank manager who wants his money back. If I was less impatient and actually came up with a plan I might finally be able to create my empire.... but the problem is I HAVE to win the next game at all costs, so I can't ever do it.

So with my £300k, I need to start building a stadium and improve the team to such an extent that I can beat the best of the best in the GW to win that too. Fortunately throughout my FML career, I have always had some uncanny knack of pulling money out of seemingly nowhere at the last minute, but £13m ? I don't think I can manage that!

Honest Mistake

2010-06-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

Playing in the league, away from home, it's 1-1 with a few seconds to go. I'm obviously unhappy i'm not winning, injuring the entire opposition and making them rage quit, but as per my away strategy - don't try and win away games.

- no available game server to connect to

hmmm

Maybe i'll get another go and i'll win this time!

Server comes back up, yup, i've got another bash!

Bah, it's 1-1 again.

94th minute my MC goes off injured.

He's broke his leg, he's out for 35 games.

As per my last post I sold my captain and other MC last night and have yet to sign a replacement.

Bad times! To the transfer room !

Forced into signing anyone who looks like they can play football as I have shared rights to one last game, difficult team. Had to punt on the first person I could find, finances firmly back in the red, average player signed for £1.6m.

I really couldn't make this shit up could I ?

Oh, and now i've just noticed the guy i've signed is actually injured for the game I signed him for. Bollocks!

Update - managed to win the game but ANOTHER MC injured! Damnit,

I Can't Quit You Baby

2010-06-03T15:24:00.000-07:00

Deary me, nothing ever goes right for me, my team really drives me up the wall sometimes. I've been looking for an excuse to quit all night, but I can't even do that right. It seems my players have a different idea.

83rd minute winner for me, 89th minute winner for me, 3-0 down - surely this is it... 4-3 win for me, score 6 past next team in league. Playing 1st in league, one of best teams, I deliberately injure Lukaku, things are looking up, during the match a bid comes in for one of my old duffers I thought I had no chance of moving on and i'm suddenly projected a healthy balance. Meanwhile I appear to beating 1st and Lukaku is now off the pitch. Alas he gets a late penalty, SAVED! But scored on the rebound.... ends in a draw, not quit worthy unfortunately.

Yeah, i'll moan about anything ;)

Jaded

2010-06-03T11:38:00.000-07:00

Hope the 20 or so people who viewed my 3D preview video enjoyed it before I noticed I wasn't allowed to blog about it! I broke something trying to make this shitty template a bit better shortly afterwards and have only just got round to fixing it.

*warning* strange ramble incoming.

Anyway in FM terms, i'm 'jaded and in need of a rest' at the moment. After winning run #1 of the EFA qualifying only losing 2 games and drawing 2 I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Then we had a couple of days waiting for the league to reset and out of nowhere I nearly quit, I just suddenly didn't want to play the game any more.

I decided to push on and I picked my first game at home to a team I had beat 5-0 just two days prior. Of course, I lost. I lost a couple of cup games and the last few games in qualifying #1 didn't end in spectacular fashion I appear to be in a fairly dead qualifying league this time round and despite only playing 1 game i'm pretty certain i'm going to be in horrific form now. Funny thing is the team I duked it out with last time round has also played 3 and lost all 3 !

I'm just waiting for AI already but there's no easy looking games coming up so this could suddenly turn into a mid table finish.

I think it actually takes a massive amount of effort to actually do well on the game. I had to ensure that not a single game went to AI otherwise I would lose, I went to painstaking to make sure no one could play my AI and rigidly stuck to my plans and instructions. Even when doing this I know that something totally out of my control like bad form could instantly destroy the days of work I have put in.

I think it just got to the point where I thought, what the hell am I doing. I'm not sure the reward is worth the effort. I was sitting in some important meeting at work the other day and I was far more occupied with whether I should put one of my youths in at right back than what was going on.

You only sing when your winning as the song goes, but it's true. If I don't put the effort in then I wont win, and then I wont want to play then either! As you are probably aware by now, I really don't take losing especially well. Plus with all the bollocks I spout here and there I kind of feel pressured do actually do well to somehow validate the stuff i'm moaning about.

The other thing which is getting me down a bit is the way people are making so much money from transfers. Pato (100k wage) and Aguero (135k wage) signed for the same team who has a wage bill totalling £281k and just after Aguero signed he was still considered rich. I don't have anything against the managers but I just simply don't understand how certain managers are getting such excessive fees, consistently, for poor players. To be fair, this guy is still losing because he's playing 442 ;)

I'm just not really seeing how I can put together a great team, even with attaining max reputation so far in all qualifiers because i'm so far behind certain teams financially. Then again, i've never had what you can call a 'great' team in most people's eyes. hmpf

Well Well Well

2010-05-30T01:00:00.001-07:00

It wasn't very long ago that I was saying on here that I thought we needed our own ME separate to FM10 because it was the same engine but a different car. Well, with the latest ME updates to FML we have now officially diverged from FM10 and have our own version!

Some of the changes which stand out to me are:

- Adjusted way that expected result is calculated for FML matches, due to slightly different reputation scales

Really ? none of us have ever noticed how difficult it is to beat lower reputation teams, never come in the past ;)

- Reduced effect of headers won/lost on player match ratings

Uh-oh, I think I need a new DC

- Try to make full backs take more responsibility for strikers when playing against narrow 433 formations

Uh-oh, I think I need a new formation

- Small tweak to match ratings to reduce effect of high numbers of runs past opponents

My strike force :(

I suspect the new ME is going to create some serious problems for me, which is a shame as I have just managed to get my team playing some good football.

Today is the last day of run #1 of the EFA, it wont finish until tonight but I figure i'll do an update now as it's no doubt going to end in epic failure. I'm pretty happy with everything at the moment and shockingly i'm pissed off with absolutely nothing in or out of FML right now.

I think the only games I haven't won have been when my crazy DC has been suspended. My backup generally costs me a goal a game despite not being especially bad. I've managed to avoid leaving any games to my AI this time round my latest fad is some serious micro management of player instructions in matches changing things on the fly depending what the players are doing in the match.

I'm pretty sure i've got away form cracked - my results are EXACTLY the same home as they are away. The only person I know to be following my away tactic is also top of his league.

With just a handful of games left, what could possibly go wrong?

You may remember I was concerned about my goal return being too low last week, Mr Lavezzi has resolved this problem! In the league I have scored 60 goals in 23 games and my attack looks pretty scary.

My team philosophy and style is based on this team and i've come pretty close in some games. At least watch this past 1:19. Arrogance, belligerence and class is my team statement.

Moving on to finances...

So here we can see a problem I appear to have ! There's another 2 runs of prize money to go in there yet which should put me back in the green. I don't really have many saleable assets and a number of my players are at the age no one will buy them. To finance my last deal I turned auto extend off on every single player in my squad, so that projection is assuming I don't renew any contracts next season :D

So my only option is to keep winning. On and on.

Supersonic

2010-05-27T14:39:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking, shocking I know. Looking at the wages that good players are going for these days, it's going to be literally impossible to create a super team of world class players.

Now I know pre reset we had some teams that were probably a little too strong, purely because there was so little competition for players they could sign whoever they liked at a reasonable price.

But i'm just not seeing how it's going to be possible to create a good team now. A decent striker like Bojan already commands a £5m transfer fee, a player like Pato commands a £100k wage. These are not isolated incidents, these are now MV wages/transfer fees for these kind of players and they are bound to increase over at least the next season or so.

So say I want to sign a few top class players, exactly how much money is that going to cost me ? Well for a start they are going to be on £100k+ a day each, or £2.8m a season! That's not even including any signing on or transfer fees I would need to pay either.

I don't really like this, I don't want to be striving for mediocrity, I want to be trying to create the best team that has ever graced a football pitch, but I don't think it's actually going to be possible.

I guess we are going to end up with a large number of teams which are essentially fairly even in terms in player ability and it's going to come down to who can exploit the ME the best or who gets the most luck.

It's not really helped by the fact there's too many FAs meaning more teams are able to compete for higher prize money either - there never should have been any duplicate FAs, this totally ruined the FA structure for me.

I'm thinking this is as good as it gets, i'm not sure I can significantly improve my squad without spending around £10-15m in fees/wages - so what's the point ? I may as well just plug on with what i've got and see how things go.

Anyway, I had some geniune rage tonight.

GWC, 1st round, level 3 team, all youth team, of course they scored with every shot they had on target while my players turned into massive idiots. I think it may be time to start withdrawing from all cup competitions again as it's just a complete waste of time playing them, it's just roll the dice and see what happens.

Oops!... I did it again

2010-05-26T11:48:00.001-07:00

There has been a distinct lack of rage of late, I think the warm weather has made me slightly more placid than usual. My focus has been directed elsewhere this week but I wont go into the story about the lawnmower and the chisel, alas I don't think it's fixable now.

Round #3 of qualifying has started pretty well and my friendly form has been top notch. I really have the team working as I want and I won my first 4 games of the season comfortably, so much so I managed to not even concede a goal. I decided to set myself a realistic target of winning the league without conceding a goal all season at this point, alas I gave up on this idea shortly afterwards.

Anyway, things are going well ? The team is pretty much unbeatable except when i'm super keepered. But as usual i'm not happy, Loic Remy, my record signing at £2.8m was not providing the contribution I was hoping for. Sure, i'm averaging 2-3 goals a game in qualifying, but his performance is not acceptable for my team! I've pretty much had it in for him since he played his first game for me I think.

Logged on today and find someone trying to sell Lavezzi for £1.5m when his MV is £1.9m with a rather steep wage of £65k. I decide he is my man, he will fix my team, this is what I need to sort things out!

Problem was I was projected £-365k at this point. 30 minutes later I managed to pull £3.4m out of my ass which somehow allowed me to bid for the player in instalments. I say somehow, because when I tried to amend the bid it actually vetoed my original offer, so not sure what was going on there.

45 minutes or so of negotiating and a new striker is with me ! The bank manager is looking for me again as i'm now projected -£573k and my wages at £140k. Needless to say, anything but winning the league this season will be a complete and utter disaster.

The 5th match had me worried when I was 2-0 down, but fortunately my team appear to listen to me these days and we won 3-2.

P5 W5 D0 L0 F14 A2

What could go wrong !

Be Safe

2010-05-21T14:20:00.000-07:00

As per usual, I seem to have gone a bit mad on the old transfers without actually buying any top class talent. £96k wage for an unlock ? No thanks! Here's my end of season transfers:

£2.8m

£316k (wage auction)

£1m

£40k

£52k

£400k

Total spending comes to an impressive £4.6m.

I'm pretty pleased with my signings, my bank manager however, appears not to be:

English manager Lee Jones's exceptional T-Bag Town have been warned by their bank to reduce their overdraft balance of £707,201 to within the current allowed limit of £100,000, to prevent their financial state from deteriorating.

Thing is, by the time I let some contracts expire (people are too silly to actually want to buy any of my ace players i'm releasing) i'll only be paying around £95k wages. This includes a full youth team and enough backup players to cover even the worst of injury crisis. I'm in the top tier of qualifying again, and if my friendly form is anything to go buy i'm likely to be challenging for the title again. So actually, i'm playing it safe!

I spent £1m on a 29 year old with 18 NF so he's going to be the nuts for at least 3 seasons. But he's only on £5k wage ! That's £140k per season folks, £1.14m. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than spending £50k+ on a younger player who actually isn't as good.

It's nice having a striker on the bench who had almost a 1 in 2 record last season! Remy, who is my biggest transfer, appears to be complete arse, but I reckon I can get my money back if he doesn't turn it on soon.

With nothing else better to do this weekend, I think I shall claim my rightful spot at the top of the rankings ;)

Away From Here

2010-05-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

The trouble with FML, or perhaps the skill with FML is being able to work out if something you have done has lead to good results, whether it's coincidence, good luck or actually a beneficial change made by yourself.

I go through little fads and superstitions where I do the same kind of tactical changes each match, completely convinced this is what is causing me to win games without really knowing if this is the case.

Anyway, I still think I have somewhat cracked away results so i'm going to explain how and see if it works for you ! I've just won 7 games in a row away from home with ease and the FA results were generally favourable over the last few runs.

First off I have finally got round to setting a captain after 2 years as per oh my captain

When picking a captain I think you want a trade off between influence and average rating. There's no point picking a player with high influence if he plays bad every game. I also don't like picking strikers as they tend to rate badly if they don't score. I therefore try and pick a player with decent influence who plays consistently well - I prefer a midfielder as they are generally less prone to erratic ratings. Since setting my captain I don't think I have lost a game - coincidence ? Unsure.

**assumptions**
This applies to 433, I have no idea if it works with other formations. It also requires players that are fit, good stamina, and have pace/acceleration. As per my recipe for success blog a few weeks ago
**assumptions**

Moving on, the first thing you need to do is sort your opposition player instructions. You should be doing this EVERY game be it home or away. I wasn't going to mention this, but i'm convinced this works or then again it could be one of my fads. I used to spend some time checking the dangermen of the opposition before each match and setting instructions appropriately. But this is too time consuming so I have simplified this and apply generic instructions instead.

Wait for the opposition manager to submit their team, do not kick off yet. Set opposition instructions to show all of their offensive players onto their weaker foot. So if they play 433 then set it on all the forwards, if they are playing 442 then set it on the forwards and the wingers. Just use your common sense here. If you are absolutely convinced you are going to lose, then consider hard tackling someone who is a major threat - but be careful with this. Simple!

So you should be doing that every game anyway, but definitely for away games. Now when you go into an away game you need to adjust your mindset. You are not trying to win this game, you are going into the match trying not to lose it. In reality, doing this will lead to more wins.

If you have tried playing a defensive tactic on FML you will probably be aware that it's suicide and doesn't generally work very well so we need to play defensive, without playing defensive. You know those annoying matches when you're the better team and they suddenly score out of nowhere? Well this is what you are going to do.

It's fairly simple, you need to stifle play, break everything up, stop them being able to play. As they are the home team, and your not playing attacking this generally leads to more counter attacking opportunities.

I always start with 'standard' strategy and would not recommend playing anything else in away games.

So you need to break up the play - Before the match kicks off, set hassle opponents, play narrower and pump ball into the box. This will generally stop most teams play and restrict chances - it doesn't matter if your not creating anything at this stage.

You need to actually watch the game properly to identify how to change things, but you can kinda do this by looking at match stats if you are lazy. By about the 20th minute if you are creating chances and your players are finding space then change pump ball into box to run at defence. This generally results in one of your strikers getting on the end of a loose ball or running through the entire team and scoring with your first attack. Hopefully the pace will shine through and your players will be able to break from midfield.

If you are still getting outplayed at this point then drop your MC into DM (again, assuming your playing a flat 433) My MC is 'red' in DMC but he does just fine there.

As the match goes on if you are still drawing then all is good, remember you are not trying to win the game. Stick with pump the ball into box if your not finding any space - it doesn't matter if you have good jumping players or not for this to work. However, if you do find that too many balls are being aimed for the head and your not winning the battle then you probably want to take this off. You can try pass to feet if you like, but I just normally leave it on default.

I'd also suggest having your centre mids on long shots sometimes - This way you always have a chance of getting that BS out of nowhere long shot. Don't go OTT though, maybe 1 or 2 of them if they are decent in the attribute, the last thing you want is dozens of shots flying over the bar from 40 yards.

Now if you are playing a weaker team and you find you are generally dominating then you can try switching to control strategy late on in the game - never before the 70th minute, but continue to play narrow etc - it's counter intuitive I know.

You should have fit players so you can usually get away with hassle opponents from start to finish. Even if you are losing out head for head in the condition stakes it doesn't really seem to make a massive difference. If you are winning then take this off for the last 10 minutes to save condition and to try and protect your players from injury. If one of your players takes a knock and loses condition and you don't want to sub him them go into individual player instructions and take closing down off for this player.

Some of your players are likely to to have fitness issues, especially with knocks taken into account so don't be afraid to use substitutes. Just throw some more pace on after around the 65th minute in midfield and attack.

Assuming your are playing 433 as mine is set up then you should consider rotating your strikers during the match if one is playing poor. In my 433 the FCC is the goal scorer so if he is averaging <6 then I swap him with one of the others who are averaging better meaning he is less likely to fluff his chance. I suppose this is a general tactical point rather than an away tactic mind.

If your still getting well beat in the match, then there's nothing you can do about it, it's one of those games. If there is something you can do, please let me know.

That's about it I think! Let me know if it works or if it's just one of my pointless rituals i'm doing every game for no reason.

Ironic

2010-05-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

So the ME complaints rumble ever onwards with some changes and fixes going into beta testing right now.

The main complaints are basically regarding the 4-3-3, the jumping issue and the apparently ability they have to compete at senior level (although there's no specific change going in regarding this one)

But show of hands time, if those three issues were fixed/changed right now, who would have a problem ? We are all moaning about it in the knowledge that any fixes are likely to screw our teams up.

To be fair the jumping issue is likely to only affect one of my defenders and I guess it's going to make him very poor, so i'll likely need to spend on a better defender. I've drafted some youths in, mainly as backup, so if that were changed i'd have problems there too.

But the biggest problem will be if 4-3-3 suddenly becomes an ineffective formation to use. Most of the better teams are currently playing this formation, they have no wingers and a large collection of forwards on their books. It's unlikely that 4-3-3 will become totally useless but it will be interesting to see how much it's effectiveness is actually reduced by.

Not saying that we shouldn't improve the ME, but it's just kind of ironic we are all moaning about it knowing it's likely to cause us problems!

Roll With It

2010-05-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

Been trying to follow my plan to keep it tight finances wise and generally been disregarding the transfer market other than the odd bargain here and there. I bid £975k for a MC earlier, Inacio Piatti, he negotiated me to £1.4m so I thought, keep it tight and withdrew the bid. Around 20 minutes later he sells him for a staggering £2.3m !

So i'm keeping it tight, all is well, then half hour later I set the joint 6th highest GW transfer on a player who I know isn't actually that great. What's wrong with me ? £2.8m spent on one player who's far from a game winner !

I figure there's not much choice if I want to compete next season. One of my biggest failings on FML has been a lack of dynamism in moving players in/out and getting stuck with players I can't sell. So I guess if I can't beat them, I may as well just roll with it and see what happens.

I'm doing alright though, won the season 1 qualification league outright, finished 4th, 1st and 2nd in the EFA runs so i'm definitely going to be towards the top of the deck in reputation terms so I may as well treat myself. Senior team is ranked 22nd and my youth team has silently moved into the top 15 without any fuss. The youth team are pretty much all high potentials according to my admittedly rather inaccurate JP2 readings so hoping to bring a few of those through.

I have some tough decisions to make too, I can't decide if I should keep some of my duffers who perform so well or just release them (can't sell them) to cut wages down a tad more. I have a 30 year old MC, AF £26k, £2.5k wage averaging 7.00+ (no jumping hacks!)who has a 1 in 4 assist ratio. But he's getting loads of reds, I can't decide what to do. I have several other players in this kind of situation too, more contemplation required.

I've been thinking as well, why is it my AI is so awful and loses most matches ? Why is it that when I play teams playing the same formation as me, home or away, i'm nearly always the best team even if they have better players than me. I actually play a more defensive version of my tactics away from home and I very rarely issue any extra attacking instructions and only use "standard" strategy. So it's not a case of overloading them or anything like that.

My AI has a 36% win ratio whereas I have a 58% win ratio in official games, or 70% in unofficial games. I must conclude this is tactic related but I have a basic match plan to replicate my most common changes. So I conclude the difference relates to the individual player instructions I deploy every game. Not sure I want to give this one away if this is actually the case as I know very few, if any, managers are doing this like I do!

Keep the Faith

2010-05-17T14:41:00.002-07:00

Okay, i'm going to write up my end of season review, live, as it happens. I'm just gonna type this as it goes and not edit it, so it could turn out to be really bad.

It's 10.30pm and I have 6 games left to go and the table looks like this:

Game on.

First match is at home to position #20. My main DC is suspended and my backup DC got injured after coming on as a sub in the 88th minute of the previous game to replace him.

Result 1 - Total domination, 3-1 victory and PP has me joint first place !

10:47pm
Second match is away to position 14th, my DC is back but one of my MCs is suspended now and my other one is injured. Should be able to cover this though.

Not started well, 1-0 down to an insane long shot after 1 minute.
15 minutes in and it's going worse, disallowed goal for them and i'm getting absolutely battered. As per usual with away games my team isn't bothering to play.

30 minutes in and i'm 2-0 down, he's had about 15 shots already. Go go go away form.

HT and it's a joke of a match, no way i'm going to win this. I'm getting totally destroyed by a shit DM of all things.

Ends 2-0, typical away game where my team don't bother playing at all and utterly destroyed by a poor team.

10:57 time for a home game to make sure I don't enter bad form, home to 18th should do the trick.

I'm now sitting 2nd on PP.

20 minutes in and i'm getting super keepered already but a far post corner has put me 1-0 up. The difference between the last match is astounding, suddenly my players have remembered they are footballers, they have time, they have space, they know how to pass again. The other keeper is still on an 8.0 but it's 2-0 now, just waiting for the usual comeback to happen now.

60 minutes gone, 0 shots for him, 5 cccs for me and it's 3-0, woo!

and so it ends, 3-0 victory, total domination.

11:08 - away to 17th, best striker suspended. I know i'll be shit anyway, as it's a dreaded away game. The bad news is my last 3 games are all away!

Table update:

Tight. I know i'm not going to win it as the last 3 games are away.

Back to the game... this guy appears to have Hulk in attack. I'm concerned!

Connection currently died..... need to reset router.

11:23, stupid fucking internet breaking. Seem to be back up now, why does shit like this always happen at the most annoying time possible.

8th minute and I take the lead with a penalty! get in there!

HT and it's still 1-0, i've got 2 of his players down to <50% condition, kept Hulk queit and i'm smashing him off the park. It's going to go wrong though... because it's an away game. IT'S TWO NIL!

Here we go, 56th minute, they have had their first shot of the game and it's 2-1. To compound my woe, my striker is now injured and ive had to bring a 15 year old on.

And they have had their 2nd shot of the game and it's 2-2. Sigh. Now the striker i've just brought on to replace the injured one is.... injured. FUCK OFF. I've had 5 cccs ffs. One of his players is on 36%...

THIRD FUCKING SHOT OF THE GAME AND ITS THREEE FUCKING NIL. FUCK YOU RETARDEDED ME. HES GOT EIGHT FUCKING PLAYERS.

YEAH, 6th CCCS of match and it's 3-3. GET IN THERE YOU BEAUTY!

Seriously.... your having a fucking laugh?

11:37 - away to 11th position and 1-0 up after 5 minutes. If I don't win this it's game over.

OH WHAT IS THIS, WHAT IS THIS ??? HAS HE SCORED WITH HIS FIRST FUCKING SHOT AGAIN, HAS HE ??? OF FUCKING COURSE HE HAS.

2-1, get in.

80th minutes gone, still winning... just waiting for it.

Full time, i've won!

11:46 away to 4th... bad times.

Top scorer now injured.

other manager just come online, this may complicate things.

HT and nowts happening, a couple of shots a piece. I tell a lie, he's scored with his first shot on target in 45+2.

57th minute and my equaliser is disallowed.

I never do this, but time for all out attack..

ATTACK THEN FOOLS! OH HE'S THROUGH ON GOAL BUT HAS THE FIRST TOUCH OF A 1 LEGGED DONKEY

ONE FUCKING ONE 87th minute... COME ON.

GK ignored my instructions to come up for the corner, and so it ends..

Hmmm. He's home to a poor team. My fate now rests with the gods of the ME.

Shame I lost the first 4 games of the season due to the stupid AI rights thing :S

00:22, league is lost. Second place confirmed. Bah

Teenage Kicks

2010-05-16T15:16:00.000-07:00

I'm not entirely sure I can rant on behalf of an opposition manager, but I know i'd have been straight on here if this had happened to me.

So i'm 1-0 up in the league at the home, and my GK gets sent off - if you watched my video the other week, i'm sure you are aware my GK is a crazy fool. I don't have a reserve GK on the bench so I decide my best course of action is to put a 15 year old striker in goal. Since moaning about youths being too good, I figure, if you can't beat em, join em, so I currently have a 15 year old in my strike force. Shortly afterwards I go 2-0 up. He only just manages to draw 2-2 with me with a last minute equaliser.

Anyone played FM10 ? It's pretty good actually, I really enjoyed it, it's much better than FM09, 3D is good and the ME is fairly sensible. If you know the tricks of FML then you will destroy everyone in sight, but that aside and assuming you do normal things you generally get sensible results. But the line which is normally trotted out is that FML is the same engine.

Great, but it's not the same car is it ? It doesn't work in the same way. Lets talk about engines, what about the VW 1.8T engine, I had one of those in my Golf, it was pretty nice, get it mapped and the BHP is pretty handy. (it was swapped for a Renaultsport which I raged into an Astra/Fence, but that's another story i'm sure you don't want to hear about ;) ) But it's the same engine which is in a Passat and about a dozen other cars including various Audis Does it handle the same ? No. Does it drive in remotely the same way? No. Does it have the same acceleration ? No. Does it have the same gadgets and features ? No. Engines are tuned for the car they are responsible for.

FML throws up so many different scenarios that the ME on FM10 simply doesn't encounter such as all youth teams. I could probably name half a dozen FM10 inputs of the top of my head which simply can't be in FML or must be set to some default setting.

I distinctly remember a conversation I had about 3 weeks before GWs reset with a fellow unnamed rager on beta. I was beating him 8-5 or something completely stupid and we were discussing how people were going to go mad when they realised how bad the ME actually was. I suggested that it would be fine for the first season or so when people had the random initial pools but people would soon realise it's equally as bad even when you start to get better players with results all over the place.

So what's happening now ? I don't even have to moan about the ME because everyone else is ! In a rather sell out fashion i'm actually rather reluctant to actually say what I think about this because i'm aware that too many people seem to read my crap these days.

But people are complaining about issues which were raised by myself and others over 6 months ago and they were dismissed. Giving feedback on the ME seems to be like talking to a brick wall, a perfect brick wall ;) The FM10 crew and testers seem to be treated as the the special ones whereas us FML people are treated as crazy people who don't know what we are talking about. The very reason I restarted this blog was because the ME in beta was pissing me off and I couldn't get anywhere on the forums, so I decided to just rant instead.

In reality, a competitive environment like FML is always going to highlight any potential weaknesses and problems over FM10 playing against the CPU.

We need our own ME tbh, or the one we used to have pre reset ;)

Don't Stop Me Now

2010-05-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

I see Jak seems to having a little moan about bad form of late:

He's got this pretty much spot on I think, the patterns are pretty much as he describes. I haven't had chance to rant about this post reset because I have made specific pain staking efforts to manage my form in such a way that I do not enter bad form. Alas, that's all gone down the pan due to me being offline for about 36 hours and losing a shit load of AI games at the start of the 3rd run of the EFA - the worse possible time it could happen. Before the third run started I was planning to post about how this is usually the point everything goes wrong.

I'm still getting results here and there but i'm definitely in what Jak describes as stage 2. Every game is a shit storm of disallowed goals, sending offs, injured players, knocks, freak events, last minute goals, super keeperings etc. Games suddenly become a combination of the worse series of events you can possibly imagine, then you go home after the game to find the opposition reserve team has fucked your sister.... and stolen the microwave, then taken a shit on your doorstep.. a massive shit.. which smells.. bad.

I think I might actually get out of this one though as I still think I might have cracked away form. It could just be coincidence, but away results while entering bad form are unusual.. we shall see.

What Jak probably isn't aware of is "stage 7" where your team enters really appalling form where it's virtually impossible to win any game against any team no matter what you or the opposition does. The only solution seems to be to sell and replace most of your team. I've experienced this twice, it's not good, believe me.

On a positive note I received a nice 4.5 star graduate from my academy today who has 16 in jumping, 16 pace and can play DR or DM. Awesomeness ! Only had 4 grads in a month from my 1.5* academy, 2x4 star, 1x3.5 star and 1x4.5 star. I've sold the others for a pittance because they didn't fit my formation or I didn't need them. I wonder why my academy isn't broken ;)

Back In Black

2010-05-13T13:53:00.000-07:00

I'm not really having a good week.

First off, i'm currently on jury service which is actually a strangely similar experience to playing FML. Basically you sit around doing literally nothing all day, in a room with some other people who are also doing nothing where there's a couple of annoying people who chat bollocks most of the time, but other than that there's not much going on. So you just sit there, just waiting for something to actually happen, then it gets to lunch time and you you wait to see if you might get sent home. Then you come back the next day and do the same again hoping today will be the day something will happen.

The problem is, you can't actually ever leave this room just in case you get called onto a jury (challenged to a match) and in the event you do actually leave the room and go outside (log off) you can almost guarantee something will happen. Then when you finally get into the action, you find it's some long ridiculous drawn out process and something which should have been finished in a morning has lasted 3 fucking days (and I don't get tomorrow off now damnit!)

To compound my woe, I appear to have food poisoning, so between spending my time in court and the toilet, I haven't had much time for FML the last two days.

The 3rd run of the EFA started 2 days ago at 19.15. So I log on today after a few days off and see i've got 8 AI games or so due to land tonight. Now I know that I wont have AI in any of these because i've not been on. So I start throwing out challenges and of course most people just IGNORE them as usual (fuck sake, just DECLINE IT) I challenged one guy around 4 times today, left the challenge in for 15 minutes or so, AI due tonight. He ignores it and sure enough, he wins the AI rights because I didn't challenge him within the correct window of opportunity or rubbish. Has he challenged me ? No, he's made a deliberate effort to actually not play me.

*update - log on this morning and i've lost every single AI game. A whole fucking months worth of work is going to be effectively ruined because of this joke of an AI rights system. I'll almost certainly be in bad form now, i'd never ever let the team lose more than 2 in a row, i'd imagine i'm gonna end up near bottom of league now. And as per usual AI games i've got a load of fucking injuries. very very very very angry*

Now I missed the first 2 days of the last run also and despite being online after this quite a lot, I essentially lost AI to 90% of my games which is what I expect to happen again this time.

The league games I got in have started well enough though, still undefeated and got a nice 5-0 victory. I'm pulling out of all friendly competitions now and going casual now for reasons i'll no doubt rant about another time (basically, the XFA is shit, and we don't need more quickplays etc) but the main reason is because of this stupid major/minor form you have. True enough, after my 5-0 win I roll up at rank 400th, won 2 games in the last 20 or so and he pastes me off the pitch and he's 2-0 up within 5 minutes.

Anyway i'm back in credit for the first time since the GW launched! Sold some of my youth players on, only modest profits really but it's put me back in the black. Players are still too expensive and I feel like i'm getting left behind. No doubt by the time Messi and the like come up people will still have loads more money from selling on youth players for silly sums.

I tried selling a 28 year old MC, average of 7.50+ last season, 7.07 this season, playing great, MV £850k for £500k yet no one would even bid. Decided just to keep him until he's old and i'll release him, worth more to me than a tiny sum of cash.

The Kids Aren't Alright

2010-05-11T09:39:00.001-07:00

I have high hopes for this lad I found on the free agent list recently. He's gained 3-4 in some attributes already and he's looking pretty good ! Technically he actually looks better than my second best senior defender.

Youth attributes seem crazy high at the moment, especially for such young players. I reckon my youth team could do a job against a lot of senior sides, i'm just too scared to risk it right now! As i've been a bit fed up lately I haven't really bought or sold anyone so I think it's time to do a clear out for the 3rd run of the EFA which will no doubt end in disaster! Barely had any injuries at all so far so quite a few can go.

Speaking of DCs we know that jumping is the attribute to watch for to make them average well. I have had a gander over the anomalies in the data, the players with high jumping but a poor average rating to see what they have in common. The results are pretty much what you would expect in that they all have low pace/acceleration and especially agility!

I've been looking over the striker data again trying to work out how to sign the perfect striker. I won't do any more graphs as the data analysis thing is Andreas' bag but I am rather confused by it at all.

There's a couple of issues with trying to make any sense of the data too. If you look at DCs they are pretty much going to be unaffected by tactics in terms of how they perform as it's a fairly standard position and most teams play 4 at the back. But when you look at strikers there's all sorts of variables, how many are playing up front ? What formation ? Support or attacking ? I find in my own formation with the way I have it set up that only 1 of my players tends to score many goals. So it depends who is playing where on what they are going to score.

So, what attributes effect a strikers average rating ? Actually, pretty much none of them ! We all know that jumping does but none of the attributes really have a significant link to a players average rating.

So what does effect it ? Rather obviously, it's goals scored.

So what attributes effect goals scored ? Pretty much all of them ! Any attribute you would associate with being a good striker, including technical ones, like finishing, have a significant increase on the average number of goals per game scored.

The reason i'm confused is, based on this, I can't work out how some of my strikers have been able to score so many goals considering I have long advocated physicals over technicals but the data simply doesn't support this to be true.

So if you are looking for a striker what do you need to look for ? First off, i'd suggest ignoring average rating. While this may seem odd, it's only linked to goals scored, and goals scored is linked to how and where the player is played. Clearly a player with a high average rating will also be good, but likely more expensive. I wouldn't be put off by a player that has a poor scoring record if the attributes look good. The only attributes which don't really seem to do much are bravery, determination, influence and team work.

There doesn't seem to be any secret to the perfect striker, good players will score more, simple as that. It's almost every single attribute that has an effect on it, they higher they are the more they score.

I suspect it's likely linked to CA and hidden attributes in a significant way (obviously, attributes are linked to CA but you know what I mean). If I had some names from a RS GW I think I could do a vlookup on a FM10 DB extract to compare to CA.

ME 1 - T-Bag 0

Too Quick to Type

2010-05-10T07:31:00.000-07:00

They're quick to talk when they can't be seen, hid behind computer screens
It's bitch bitch type type, delete, re-write, we're shite, that's right, according to them.

I'm sure there's one thing that we can all agree on, and that's that I should probably shut up occasionally. So with that in mind, I decided i'd write a new post.

Back on old FML I created my own version of 460 before it became big time and it was far superior to the popular version on the forums. I decided to share this with my mates and promptly spent the next 4 months sitting 2nd in the GW and 2nd in the league behind one of them. I figured at this point I should probably stop telling people these kind of things.

So spin on a year and some guy is beating me 4-0 or something and he tells me he's been following my tactical advice. Damnit! I've had several other mails telling me similar things and they all seem to be doing better than me. With that in mind, i'm considering not revealing my latest tactical thoughts ! I think I might have even cracked away issues to some extent. I thought no one listened to my ramblings!

Anyway, despite my monster fixture pile up last night I managed to win run #2 of the EFA top tier qualifying. P44 W27 D9 L8

How much did that cost me in players? Lets have a look:

£250k - record signing

£27k

£29k

£33k

£1

Total cost of my first choice 11 is £830k. Considering I won the first season qualifier too, it does beg the question of how my current balance is -£834k. My total wages are £74k and that includes a full youth team. Podolski signed for £57k wages this morning, i'm not entirely sure how I am supposed to significantly improve my team so it looks like i'm sticking with the duffers for the foreseeable future.

Jump Around

2010-05-09T05:01:00.000-07:00

Andreas over It's A Numbers Game at kindly sent me some of his data last week. I have decided to create some graphs to show the relationship between attributes and average ratings.

The following is for the DC position only and is based on data of 1173 players, I believe from GW Sanchez.

Jumping vs Average Rating

Strength vs Average Rating

Tackling vs Average Rating

Marking vs Average Rating

Positioning vs Average Rating

Concentration vs Average Rating

I've checked most of the attributes and the only ones which seem to actually have much of an effect on a DCs average rating are jumping and strength. I may have missed one or two as I didn't check them all, but I checked all the obvious ones.

As you can see, key defensive attributes like tackling and marking have no effect whatsoever on average rating. I stuck a couple of metals in there and again you can see that they don't do anything either. They also don't have any effect at all on the number of goals you concede per game.

So lets have a look at how attributes effect goals conceded. This is based on the average number of goals conceded per game.

WOW ! We have found a non-physical attribute which does something ! Concentration !! Interestingly you see here that while high jumping leads to high average ratings it does not lead to less goals conceded. The only things I can find which really seem to impact this much is stamina and concentration (there may be others, not checked them all)

No surprise that again tackling and marking have absolutely no effect whatsoever. As I have been banging on about for a long term, physical attributes don't do anything ! (This isn't quite true for other positions as I have found out though)High tackling actually appears slightly detrimental, although this is likely that because there's fewer players at the higher end of the scale who happen to be bad in other areas.

So, what have we learnt here today ? Nothing new as it happens.

- Tackling & Marking = useless
- High average ratings = Jumping & Strength
- Less goals conceded = Stamina & Concentration.

Just a quick note on form again.

Beta team has won 2 in 20, I am to be fair the worse team by a long shot. Guess who the two wins were against ? 1st and 2nd of course ! 1st is probably one of the best teams I have seen on FML - a full team of RS with Kaka and the likes. He smashed me 8-1 away. I won 3-0 at home.... I also beat 2nd 4-1. The boot is on the other foot this time. I signed Lavezzi to keep me up with 2 games left to play, alas when I signed on the game had already been started against me. One game to go, looking bad :(

Insomnia

2010-05-09T03:30:00.001-07:00

Hmm.

PP has me top of league, my AI never wins, no sleep for me tonight ?

I could moan about how this has happened but i'm still in a reasonably good mood after Leeds promotion yesterday

Keep Pushin' On

2010-05-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

One of my post reset rules was that I must wait 24 hours before any rage related sales or crazy antics. This makes quitting harder work than it used to be.

I've decided to just keep pressing on for now and see how things go and just try not to get too stressed. It's not as though i'm doing bad or anything, pretty much been top 30 rankings for a long while. Predicted Points actually has me top of the league at the moment and i've only lost 4 games so far this run. But those 4 games that I lost were epic bullshit and some of the draws too. I can think of one game all season where I have lost in a normal way to a team which played better than me.

Anyway I came up with this conspiracy several months back and I still think it might be true - They have made the ME enormously random on purpose. It's been changed without us knowing to stop teams winning too much. It makes perfect sense and it's complete genius.

Teams like me log on every day trying to find that perfect formula to create an all conquering winning team, we win 20 games in a row then BANG can't win for shit. Get mad, come back later and BOOM winning everything again. So you THINK your so close to getting it right, you keep messing, tweaking, changing, trying to get it to work..... except it's not possible.

It was actually exactly a year ago that I set my old GW record for games undefeated - standing at an impressive 90 games (ended only by a broken 2 legged cup game) this was a totally geniune record of league games and matches against the top teams. The current record on my GW today stands at 36. So while we carry on trying and failing to find the perfect formula the smaller teams get their kicks by randomly pasting good teams every so often so even they think they are doing something right.

I've also got a pretty good youth team, pretty much all high potentials on low wages which I picked up from the free list so I could perhaps make a bit of cash on those in a while or some should be good enough to make first team football.

I'm going to try not buying any players (not got anyone all season, still playing with guff) and perhaps try and ninja Messi or someone.

Speaking of form the beta team are having an interesting time of it of late. I restarted a couple of seasons back and picked a team of youngish, decentish potential players and i've done barely anything with them buying only about 3 players.

First 2 runs in the Championship I finished mid table before BOOM promoted after a good run of form in run 3. Came out all guns blazing in the Premiership and finished 6th in the first run (again, not bought or sold any players) next run i'm 10th. The third run is finishing up right now and i'm bottom of the league, getting an absolute hammering conceding 21 goals and scoring 1 in my last 7 games including an 8-1 defeat. I can almost guarantee i'll be relegated again from the Championship next season as i'm not going to buy anyone and my form is wrecked.

I Miss You

2010-05-07T15:36:00.000-07:00

Remember when attributes reflected what you watched your players doing on the pitch ?

Remember when attributes other than jumping, pace, acceleration made players good ?

Remember when technical attributes had a reason to actually be there?

Remember when tactics worked ? Remember when tactical changes made a difference to what happened on the pitch ?

Remember when it was possible for the best team to dominate a game without equal chances all round ?

Remember when all youth teams played like youth teams ?

Remember when 15 year olds didn't score 50 yard long shot winners ?

Remember when the long shot attribute had some bearing on how likely a player was to score a long shot ?

Remember when morale used to change in game which had at least some basis in reality so if you were winning your players got complacent instead of just "furious!" or "angry"

Remember when every single goal didn't come from an horrific error/corner/longshot/45º angle ?

Remember when players with good attributes used to score beautiful goals instead of carbon copies?

Remember when you could win games away from home ?

Remember when you watched football games instead of a collection of unrelated highlights ?

Remember when your team didn't take 14 knocks per match ?

Remember when the only problems with the ME was that the only games you lost was when the opposition GK got MOTM and you got 1swed ?

Remember when results made sense ?

Good times.

Long gone but never forgotten.

We miss you x

The Decision

2010-05-06T14:23:00.000-07:00

Thought i'd play a few games while deciding what to do.

Drew 1-1 with an all youth team.

Winning 1-0 against an all youth team, 93rd minute they equalise.

Playing bottom of league, i've had 68% possession, 23 shots on goal, they score with an unreal longshot and win 1-0 from an injured player with their second shot of the game. Away from home of course.

Playing another all youth team winning 2-0 after multiple cccs and total domination, then suddenly the 15 year olds come at me like their lives depend on it, wave after wave before winning a penalty in the 93rd minute.

Playing in the cup, away from home, against a team which only has 15 players in their squad, 2 of whom are injured. They are down to 10 men, game goes to ET, they are down to 9 men, they have had 1 shot the entire game. Guess who got MOTM, guess who lost ?

Complete and utter fucking joke of a game. I think I could shit a better ME out of my arse, all I would need to do would be to swallow a dice first.

The problem is I really want to play the game, but it's just pointless as the ME is so awful. If we went back to the old ME the game would be pretty much near perfect. Sure it had some flaws but it wasn't so bad and results made sense.

Think I will sell my team tomorrow and go all youth, should have done enough to make top tier of round 3 qualifiers so i'll be pretty rich. Either that or i'll just give up all together, i'm leaning towards the latter.

I'm So Tired

2010-05-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

Think this is it.

Normally I get mad and want to quit but it's different this time, now i'm just bored.

I'm sure everyone knows the main reason, being the ME is fucking shit. Secondly all my AI lands at 10pm meaning I have about 30 games to play when I want to go to bed and if I don't play them I lose them all. Thirdly my GW sucks.

Might go all youth or something, i'll probably end up winning league if I play 15 year olds like.

Dunno, i'll sleep on it, but really can't be arsed any more.

You Know I'm No Good

2010-05-03T05:10:00.000-07:00

After the remainder of the auto resolves went through I ended up rather disappointing finishing 4th in the first run of the EFA. I can't see the table now but I think there was only about 5 points separating 1st from 4th. So trying to analyse what went wrong, I look at my results to see where it was lost. Was it because I lost to better teams ? Nope, was it because I had a bad run of form ? Nope, was it before I had no injury cover ? Nope. It was simply because of poor results against the worse teams in the division down at the bottom of the table. Just a couple of wins in those games I absolutely dominated where I lost to some freak event would have won me the league. Yet oddly, I beat most of the top teams without too much hassle.

But looking at my squad, I probably actually have one of the worse teams in the division. If you had said to me I would finish top 6 before the season started I would have been delighted. So I guess I shouldn't be too disappointed ? But it's just the way it happens. If I had lost games I deserved to lose, if the better teams had beat me I wouldn't be bothered. But it never goes down like that!

So now I find myself in the same situation I always seem to be in. All of my players appear to be terrible, no one wants to buy them, yet as usual i'm still doing better than most.

I accidentally sold 2 of my DCs (don't ask, I do stuff like this a lot) the other day, so my second choice DC is pretty awful. According to FM10 database he has 100CA 119PA yet he is averaging 7.05, never does anything wrong and chips in with some goals.

So check out these, badly formatted, pictures. The bottom one is the AF of my team and the others are of other teams in my qualifying. Oddly the one with the highest average finished 15th. Mine is by far the worse yet it seems to make no difference at all.

This always happens to me, I refuse to pay silly prices so I end up with no players but somehow in loads of debt. I've been banging on about this for ages, but you don't need good players, you just need the right players. The DC I mentioned earlier has 18 jumping, thus he averages and plays well. My 2nd top scorer who is a striker has an AF of 35k yet he has the pace and acceleration. My DR is averaging 7.10 yet he's actually a winger and has 8 tackling with an AF of 16k?! Again he has the key attributes, being able to tackle or mark not being either of those ;)

I've been looking for a new DC for ages without any luck but i've just picked one up this morning for £25k and i'm certain this is going to be an awesome signing and he's actually got decent potential!

People must go mad when they are playing me, looking at how much they have spent and how awful my players are yet watching my guys play like they are champions of the world. Pretty much been in top 25 of rankings most of the time too.

I've not even done anything with tactics in all honesty. I just made one in the tactics creator then turned off long shots. I only ever use about 3-4 shouts which I have mentioned previously.

So to conclude, i'm either a genius or the ME is broken.

Side

2010-05-02T15:11:00.000-07:00

Okay this is actually driving me insane now. I hadn't even noticed this until someone mentioned it to me the other day.

But just about every frigging goal comes from the side/edge of the area on a 45º angle.

It's doing my head in massively, about 75% of goals are identical.

ME fails once again.

Oh and, I drew with a team playing 4-1-5 earlier.

That is all.

Shoot to Thrill

2010-05-02T07:45:00.000-07:00

Football is pretty boring you know, most matches are actually quite dull with not much happening in them. When I had a season ticket I used to get so bored some games I would almost stop concentrating on what's happening and start day dreaming or wondering if there was going to be any balti pies left at half time.

Just having a quick look over the Premiership stats from the weekend (just from the paper) the average shots a home team had was 11 and 8 for the away team. Looking over my recent FML games the average shots a home team has is 18 and 14 for the away team. Not enough data to prove anything at all, but as I have been moaning about lately, FML is just non stop kamikaze football. I play "standard" strategy and i'm not sure I follow the logic that every manager players super attacking. It's just annoying, I want boring games without idiotic things happening!

I finished my first qualifying run, 44 games in 5 days. Crazy stuff, not sure who set this thing up, why my division has 23 teams in or why it's lasting 5 days. Still a few fixtures elsewhere to go through but I should have 3rd hopefully.

Meanwhile the transfer market is entering silly season once again, my deflation prediction is looking a bit off the mark, or at least early.

I'm all for creative adverts when selling, but for gods sake I wish the buyers would exercise some common sense.

Pictures speak better than words for this one:

-6 = 90-120PA

Look at his AF ! He's clearly not high potential, he's clearly NEVER going to be a HHN, the fact all his atts are above 10 is a DISADVANTAGE, he's not going to get much better!!! His PA is all used up.

There's shit like this all over the place at the moment.

Sigh

Video Killed the Radio Star

2010-05-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

Greetings, I thought I would have a go at recording a video of my day on FML.

Might want to use the direct link as the embedding seems to have gone a bit funny.
Video link

Decent Days and Nights

2010-04-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

This is a brand new problem, a problem without any clues
If you know the clues it's easy to get through

But you look confused and you don't know what to do
It's hard to get an answer if you haven't got a clue
If you work it out tell me what you find
We can have a few decent days and nights

So following on from moaning about the ME I want to complain about form some more. Specifically the fact you seem to have separate form in different competition classifications. So your major FA form appears to be completely unrelated to the form you will have in XTRA competitions which are minor.

I suppose the common denominator would be morale, but as with most things related to the ME, this doesn't seem to do anything either. In fact it doesn't ever actually seem to change with skills anyway.

How on earth are you supposed to manage your team when they play totally different in one competition compared to another ? Is my DC actually really poor or is he just one bad form in one competition class ? Can my striker really score 1 in 1 or is his real ability 1 in 10 in the FA games ? Who knows! Is my GK really an idiotic chump who scores an OG every third game in the FA or is he actually a pretty good keeper?

I've been pretty much unbeaten in all XFA games so far this season until today when my form has randomly decided to turn in that. Youth GK super keepering and one shot wondering to rank 700. Meanwhile FA form has picked up again as I pasted someone 4-1 in-between.

My main striker has 23 goals in 35 games and an average of 7.29 in unofficial games (I haven't played any friendlies - just XTRA) yet he has 7 goals in 23 and an average of 6.70 in official games. There's little difference in the overall ability of the clubs in either of these competitions, so which one is correct? I have no idea! Why is he shit in the league but shit hot in the XTRA ?

As per usual i'm totally confused as to what the hell is going on.

Meanwhile, my youth team has finally found some games to play. This adventure hasn't started off especially well as I usually have 3 players off injured within the first half and rarely finish the game with a team. One particular incident sums up my youth team thus far. 1-0 down at HT I make a tactical sub which is going to turn the game in my favour. The sub takes the kick off and passes to the other guy in the centre circle, except the action of KICKING OFF INJURES HIM! 16 bloody seconds on the pitch, all he's done is kick off and he's off injured.

Damaged Goods

2010-04-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

I don't think I have had a moan about the ME since launch so I figured it was about time as it is still annoying me on a daily basis.

Lets start off with the conclusion if you don't want to read my ramblings - The ME sucks, it's the worse ME in the history of the CM/FM series - including CM4. It looks more like football, but that's it.

Lets start with the players. Player attributes are generally completely meaningless with only a few seemingly making much difference to anything. A player with strong physical attributes will constantly outplay supremely technically gifted players no matter what the gap in quality. People seem to think this is only happening now because the general standard of players is poor, I can assure you this is not the case and it will be exactly the same once better players are unlocked.

It's all about the physical attributes and especially pace and acceleration in offensive players. As I posted before, I managed to get Jermaine Beckford to score 40 odd goals on FM10 in the Premier League / Champions league when he has a CA of around 120.. I don't really bother paying any attention to technical attributes any more as they simply don't do anything.

The issue is though, the general quality of your team, regardless of whether you pack it with physical attributes, actually has almost no bearing whatsoever on whether you will win the game or not. The only time this doesn't apply is where there is a massive difference in the overall CA of the teams which are playing each other.

Results are almost entirely based on your form no matter how good your team is. But form seems to be based on absolutely nothing I can understand. There's just no link at all between anything in the game as far as I can tell. I've gone from runs of 40 odd games almost unbeaten to 40 odd games with one solitary win - with the same team and tactics. What changed? Nothing, my team suddenly change from being unbeatable - which was stupid anyway - to not being able to win anything - which was equally demented.

Even when you are on good form, you will totally out of the blue get absolutely hammered by a very poor team. It's not always a case of entering bad form either, the team will be poor, manager offline, no match plans, no special formations and nothing of note. They come out hell for leather and before you know it you are 5-0 down. You change formation, you change your tactics, you change the players but nothings happening??? This awful team who has lost their last 10 games is suddenly running through your team like it doesn't exist.

These random results happen all the time, there's almost no way to know when it's going to happen. It's not a case of just losing a game, that's cool, it's a case of getting utterly destroyed for no apparent reason. Then ten minutes later you beat them 5-0 or something.

Which brings me on to my next point. The ME is a harsh mistress... never treats you right. I know what people are going to think when they read this, but, you almost never lose a game fairly. Why can't you play a team which is a bit better, they play better than you and they win the game - just occasionally? What happens is you completely hammer a team into the ground and they score 4 long shots with players who have <10 in the attribute. They score a last minute equaliser, their GK gets MOTM, your GK decides to throw the ball into the back of the next in the last minute. The losing team always turn into supermen in the last 15 minutes when they are behind regardless of whether any tactical changes have been made.

I just want SOME normal games, where one team plays better than the other and wins the game? Is this too much to expect ? Every game ends in some kind of calamity or some crazy once in life time event. I win as many games as I lose in this ridiculous fashion too. If I think back over this season's game and try and think how games the scoreline/match stats was a fair representation of what happened on the pitch, the answer probably doesn't reach double figures.

Knock Knock. Who's there ? Some fucker injuring 10 players every game. Too many knocks...

Home form is far far too strong, the only way you can win games away form home is if you have managed to get yourself on super form. The home/away split in most competitions is frightening.

It's almost impossible to lock a game down too. You can dominate a game in terms of possession and CCCS but if you look at the match stats at the end of the game the actual number of shots for each team tends to actually be quite similar. I'm not playing any kind of attacking strategy but every match is an end to end kamikaze display of attacking football. Even when i'm playing quite defensively I end up watching my entire team bomb forward like morons in the 85th minute of the game. Next thing I know, an injured player on 45% condition manages to run round my entire team and score a wonder goal. Oh yeah, condition doesn't seem to do much either.

What possibly annoys me more than anything though is the fact a group of school children can match or even totally out play a team of senior professionals. You see this all the time, a team of 15/16 year olds who can bend it like Beckham, pass like Xavi and score like they are Wayne Rooney. But as we already know, player attributes don't do anything ! I went off on one about this in beta and got told with home advantage taken into account there was only an average of 15-20 (or something, I can't remember) difference in CA when I lost to one. I don't care, there's no possible explanation I can accept for losing to a youth team unless they are all geniune wonder kids.

I've not even mentioned tactics yet. We all know wingers don't work any more, can't cross, strikers can't head, full backs can apparently phase shift into wingers while defending at the same time. Who knows, there's not much point doing anything with tactics other than playing a narrow formation.

gah, I could go on for pages about this but I need some food. I'm actually doing pretty well at the moment, so this isn't sour grapes about losing - Although the fact i'm doing so well is stupid because my team is poor, I just know how to manipulate the ME as much as possible.

What ? What You Got

2010-04-27T14:00:00.000-07:00

Before the relaunch I was thinking hard for something I could do at the start of the GW to get a jump on the other managers. I came up pretty much blank, with player pools, locked players and the like everything was pretty much locked down tight.

I came up with one solitary idea. Build a youth academy in a respectable footballing nation where no one else has built one. The logic behind this was that the best players generally go to academies and seen as I would have the only one in that region, and it was an area capable of producing good players, I might, just might win the lottery and get myself some top potentials.

As things transpired I couldn't carry out this plan due to issues with my starting pool I needed to spend money on players - Although I did later build a 1.5 star academy in Romania which only had 1 other academy there. Ironically I got a mail off the manager (after he read my blog about it I think) and he told me he had got some top potentials from it!

Anyway a big complaint is doing the rounds in my GW at the moment. The guys who build 5* academies are very aggrieved that those who punted up the small academies first have taken all the best players! I've seen people talking about closing the, threatening to quit the game and all sorts of daft things.

Talk about a short term view ! Now the 5* acadamies are operational, you are going to get more players, so effectively you have more of a chance of one of those being high potential - just because you are receiving more.

In the first week of the GW there was maybe only 10 people playing the lottery, so of course they were going to win big prizes! Now there's 100s playing, but you are buying more tickets with your 5* academy. I guess we still probably get more high potentials generated toward the start of the season too ? Longer term viewpoint required I think !

I sold my first grad for 60k, he was pretty good to be fair but didn't fit my formation and my second one is in my youth team looking okay. Just waiting to hit the jackpot, i'll likely be closing it around season 3 when there's more acadamies though.

Meanwhile i've moved the seniors over to the EFA which appears to have 23 teams in my division, running 3 times ! Not sure what's happened there, but i've been moaning about lack of games so I wont complain about that one. All of the XTRA competitions have started, but I hadn't noticed they all had home playing rights set when I joined, bad times as my AI lost a load of games today. Will likely be withdrawing from all of those if they stay on next time.

I've Got a Feeling

2010-04-25T09:43:00.000-07:00

I'm going to make a prediction that as season #2 starts the economy is going to go through a massive depression. Transfer fees and MV is going to drop and the number of transfers is going to go down dramatically with swaps dominating the big transfers.

Having done a spot check it looks like around 75% of clubs or even more are currently in debt. I'd love to see what the average balance is in the GW - I bet it's a negative value ! I'm on a quite staggering -£1.5m balance right now although my wages are decent, i'm predicted profit and I hopefully have some good youth assets.

Due to the initial pools being unlocked at the end of the first season a huge amount of money has gone out of the GW. It's not been transferred from one team to another, it's just vanished. The 20x signing on fee for teenagers is a killer too.

It's not all doom and gloom, obviously everyone must currently be projected to be back on an even keel within 28 days and we will see prize money coming into the projected toward the end of week 2 or 3. But those teams who don't earn a strong league finish are going to be struggling for money going into season 3 and we are going to start seeing player reputations/wages going up too so some teams could have financial problems.

My second prediction doesn't really come from any fact basis but i'm going to predict most academy graduates are going to be awful next season.

We have been told the database is supposed to be kept in check with a consistent PA balance so have a database resembling something like what we started with. Due to financial restrictions there's thousands of youths retiring right now because they haven't found a club but all the good ones have been picked up.

So in one swoop a massive proportion of the lower quality youth players have just been effectively deleted by the database. Some of these youths are far from awful too, it's just there's that many youth teams around yet. So i'm guessing to compensate, it's going to generate more poor players than you would see normally.

I've just managed to cobble together a youth team ready for the season too. No injuries in youth games has allowed me to get away with a small squad. I'm going to need a lot of luck to win big money in the seniors I think.

Smile

2010-04-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

Okay this is probably going to be a bit of a weird post but..

I've been accused of a lack of rage lately, and on reflection this is true. Why is it true ? Because I believe they have pretty much fixed the game. Over the months post the reset announcement pretty much every issue regarding the problems with the game was debated to the smallest detail on the beta forums. The discussions were often head spinningly complex and some of the stuff discussed was right out there - We even managed to get a proper proposal for my "delete the FAs!!!!11" idea at one point, but that never came to be.

If my memory serves me correct, I recall the slogan on the Championship Manager 1 loading screen was "Made by football fans, for football fans" - or at least something along those lines.

I don't feel like i'm playing a game any more, I feel as though I am part of the game. What was the last game you played where you directly had some kind of power or influence on how the game was made and what it included ? Seriously, when did that last happen ? When did you get to speak to the developers of a game you like and give them opinions on how to make it better, which they actually pay attention to ? When was the last time you wrote some mad blog and got an email from a developer the next morning ? The answer is almost certainly never.

I did get invited to the infamous council meeting but I didn't attend, but I did however post on the forums everything I thought needed to be changed to sort the game out. And just about everything has been changed to something along the lines of what I said - not that i'm trying to take some credit, but because they were sensible changes.

What I am trying to say is I don't feel like i'm playing a game any more, rather I feel like I am playing MY game. Every single person has a voice to influence the future of the game, SI have made it our game. I was actually slightly nervous at launch thinking, "i hope people like it" knowing that I had taken part, with everyone else, and had some influence on what was actually being released!

So does this mean no more rage ? Of course not, i'll no doubt be back soon when the ME has pissed me off ;)

My only gripe at the moment is (other than the ME being utter dog shit), I feel like the game has been fixed but the GWs (or at least mine) is simply not being run in a manner to fulfil it's potential. There's still a total lack of any competitions or any community feeling despite being on a busy and active GW. Going back to what I said before, I feel like they are ruining all the hard work everyone has put into OUR game. Don't really know if I can be arsed moving to another GW and starting again, again tbh.

The lag issues sound like a pain, but fortunately there's been zero lag at all on my GW.

Oh and i've put my old youth development guide on here now - see links on top right (due to more unfounded random bollocks being spouted by people who ought to know better) should still be fairly current.

Holding out for a Hero

2010-04-24T06:53:00.000-07:00

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast

Or I did, until I stumbled across a chap by the name of Joffre Guerron who had about a 1 in 3 goal ratio. He cost me £250k on a 4.5k wage, and... i've never seen anything like this guy. Well, actually I have and he was called Sergio Aguero. I've completely by accident signed a cheat player! I think he's scored about 6 hatricks in 20 games. He's only ever been injured once so i'm expecting him to get injured for the entire season in my first match ;)

Loving the new finance system, I am currently £1.1m in debt and still spending! Trouble is, I haven't really signed any stars and ended up with loads of youth players. So I decided I may as well just sign a youth team so I can keep em all fit as I can't risk loaning them out. Because i'm sure I can afford it... hmm!

Problem now is my spending kind of required me to win something to ensure financial stability going into season 3 and this is looking somewhat difficult now. Results are still strong and I think I can do it as long as I stay injury free.

Second problem is I have switched to the EFA and I know from experience it is extremely difficult to maintain your form over the 3 runs. In a normal season you are likely to hit a dip in form at some point. Now if you are in the EFA and this dip happens just as the third run starts, you could end up finishing near the bottom after being at the top end in the other runs. It's a risk, but I need more games due to nothing else to do.

Speaking of the EFA, another one of my current annoyances is the fact that once the first and second runs complete you cannot see the standings after they have been reset. So if the games resolve at say 12pm and your ORGs are on the ball then they could be reset by 8am the next day so by the time you log on you have no idea where you finished or what your AI% is !

So rather than following the normal FML mentality as per my previous post, and not doing anything yourself, I have come up with the following solution until something is coded in:
Miller AFA Results

It doesn't matter for qualifying but once the season is going proper I hope some of the live orgs decide to do something similar.

As a tip I would strongly advise calculating the AI % per season as you can see on the tables above. Otherwise it takes AGES to go through 3 seasons of results, and you can have teams 3 divisions lower/higher than where they started so it becomes a Ctrl + F nightmare. I reckon it would take at least 2 hours in a properly full FA just to work out who is above the AI. If you 'promote & relegate' teams on the spreadsheet after each run it suddenly becomes a 5 minute job.

Still nothing much else happening in my GW. We got a load of XTRA competitions set up a week or so ago finally but for reasons I can't really be bothered investigating none of them are even starting until season 2. Just when we need more games, the week the season starts.. yep!

Beta team finished 6th in first season/run in the Premiership, not bad for a 2 season old team really. Just taking it easy and building up some funds.

Better Man

2010-04-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

Why didn't you win the league this season ?

Is it because:

A) The teams finishing above you won more games
B) You lost more games

The answer is B.

Why didn't you win your last game ?

A)The team which won scored more goals
B)You didn't score enough goals.

The answer is B.

I applied for another job recently, I didn't get it. Was this because the person who applied for it was better ? (they were) or because I wasn't good enough. It was because I, ME, MYSELF wasn't good enough.

Now consider just about every FML whine of late, corners, 433, initial squad farce - Look at what YOU are doing wrong. It is YOUR fault that someone playing 433 is beating you, it is YOUR fault that someone is scoring more corner goals than you.

So some teams have restarted and signed up loads of players who were dispensed by the pools reserved the teams which never signed in. SO WHAT! There's some good players available for sure but there's nowhere near enough to create some super teams, there's not 100s of wonderkids available as some will have you believe. There's not even any bids on half the players i'm going to sign and i'll bet my left bollock that all of these teams don't end above me next season. In fact, i'll bet both seen as it's impossible as they will be in a lower qualifying group.

How about, instead of worrying what players other managers have, you worry about what players you have and perhaps spend less time whining about it and more time doing something about it. Even if you finished bottom of the league you should still have been able to sign enough players to be better than these restarting squads.

Apparently ALL of the best players have now been taken by all these restarters, but you could quite easily put together a team from the free list good enough to destroy the bottom qualifying tier.

So what of these 'dirty restarters' ? Nice plan ! I'm afraid maybe these managers were cleverer than you and thought outside the box to come up with a plan to beat you. I haven't restarted but we (my FML buddies) actually discussed this in the first week of the season. We suspected this could be a very viable strategy if the first season went wrong. As my pool was awful I suspected I would have to do this myself, but I managed to turn it round with some signings and win the league.

We came up with this idea by thinking about the game, thinking about what WE were going to do rather than worrying about what OTHER PEOPLE were doing.

So what if they sell a player on for a huge profit ? It doesn't affect you, sort your own house out before moaning someone has a better one than you.

The information is out there. Don't take for granted what mods tell you in game as they are often wrong. They have been going on about season 3 being the unlock date for a long while but this was obviously wrong. Go look on the forums, read every thread, understand every little detail of the game and do anything and everything you can think of to make your team the best they possibly can be.

People want everything handed to them and just look to blame everyone else for their own failings. Fix this, fix that, it's not fair ! You fail at anything in life because you are not good enough, not because someone else is better than you.

Even little things, like when the auto patch server was down the other night. I explained how to bypass this and get into the game, but everyone just ignores me and whines about it being down instead. You could have fixed this yourself!

As for last night before the fix when they were instantly signable. Best night of the game so far... it was great fun. There was scandal, chaos, activity, fun, banter... This is what it's all about !

With the audience FM has always had I suspect many managers are not familiar with the cut-throat nature of online gaming. You must do everything and anything possible to get ahead right down to the most minute detail.

Virtual Insanity

2010-04-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

Got my squad looking fairly decent in preparation for the new season but I need a whole new defence. There's literally no good defenders anywhere though, none due to unlock, none on frees, none in transfer auctions and mine are dying.

Was listening to the FM Britain webcast thing, just chilling and then logged back into FML shortly after the downtime, at around 8.03pm.

Hmm, what's this ? Some players from the initial pools from inactives have been signed. Do we have some new managers ? Have some teams restarted already ? The mods had been telling everyone the initial pool players didn't unlock until season 3, I was fairly sure this was was incorrect but I decided it wasn't worth me getting involved again. I investigated further, they haven't restarted, hmm, they haven't private transferred them and they are not new teams ??

Holey shit..... All the initial pools players have unlocked and are available to instantly sign WITH NO TAX !! Where's my fucking list ??? Damn, lost it in last format... never mind... GO GO GO !!! Punted in a few names, signed em up.

Solved my defensive problem fairly quickly with 3 instant signings including Robert Huth. We had something like 170 teams never signed in so as you can imagine, a shed load of players got released. Not long later and I have 9 new players, i'm running out of money. Turn off auto extends !!! Close the academy !! Get me more money!! I squeezed another 2 players out.

35 players sitting in my squad, 11 new signings and no tax. I'm going to be rich ! My team is ace !

There was something like 600 transfers in an hour.

Will be interesting to see how they fix this. League games have been played, loads of teams have restarted, players sold.

It was hell of a lot of fun though :D

Oh, I nearly forgot the funniest part of the night. In the middle of this, we get a mail, my GW has decided NOW is the time to run it's first ever quiz !

We are the Champions

2010-04-20T15:02:00.001-07:00

Makes no sense, my team was awful ! I'm amazed, pleased, surprised and confused, 2 games in hand too. Played 442 all season!

Current balance -£826k and dropping!

There's a static page on the top right of the blog for my projected income calculator, dunno if anyone has tried it but it seems to be working well for me.

Talkin Gypsy Market Blues

2010-04-19T14:52:00.000-07:00

So I have one fit striker left and my best player, average wise is injured for the remainder of the season, he could make it back for last 2 games. Still sitting top of the league but things are not looking especially good. I've been waiting for my prize money before making my move, but then I thought, hang on, it's paid in 4 instalments next season anyway. Time to make my move, spending time!

Wrote one of my magic transfer mails, injured best player gone for £100k two minutes later (MV 50k) Bids on my 'fine high potential youth' straight away as well as some other players.

To the Market Place ! "Looking for pacey strker, 16/16+ pace/acceleration, worth at least 100k"

PM number 1 comes in - "how much you got to spend "
Me - Up to £1m
PM Number1: Links to a 15 year old MC with 10 pace.
Me - I'm looking for a pacey striker ?
PM Number1: Links to a defender..

PM Number 2 comes in - Links to a 28 year old striker, worth 16k.
Me - I'm looking for someone a bit better than that thanks
PM Number 2 - You said a pacey striker
Me - I also said worth more than £100k ;)
PM Number 2- GL with that /leaves

I love it I really do. no sarcasm

PM3 comes in - Links to someone fitting my criteria! Good times!
/10 minutes later a deal is agreed, alas he's taxed, so the deal is off.
PM3 - How about "really awful player, low ability/potential
me - Not really what i'm after, i'm looking for pace.
PM3 - Trust me, I have the experience, pace doesn't work
me - I have experience too and would like some pace.
PM3 - You NEED this player, he's a target man! £150k. You wont score unless you buy him.
me - I'll leave it thanks.
PM3 - Ok, £100k
me - Mate, I don't want him for free.

Not to mention people demanding ridiculous fees ! I think I was probably a tad drunk after 2 hours of similar conversations to the above but I appeared to have bought some players! They look alright!

Had a 16.5k bid on Sinama-Pongolle, only 3 bids in but alas i'm out bid AGAIN! I was totally convinced this was my man, but once again not. Annoyingly, all the players I decided not to bid on, the final wage was way below what I would have paid ! I've missed out on 2 players due to the scouting bug too, damnit.

Time for plan B, pointed out to me by the real St John union of old, reunited once again. £250k for plan B, 4k wage. 3 games, 6 goals and 2 assists later from plan B and the league is once again looking good.

Current balance is -£651k and i'm planning to spend at least another million if the bank will allow it. I don't believe in playing it safe, i'm going all out, all or nothing, death or glory and all that. I want at least another five players, but i'm totally refusing to deal with anyone asking for silly money.

Money

2010-04-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

FML gets a little confusing sometimes these days.

What with all the wage multipliers, tax, profit tax and all that jazz. I never really quite know where I am with my finances. What will my projected be if I bid on this player and then that player ? What is the multiplier on this player. Only this morning I declared to my mate I could probably afford to bid £20k on 2 separate players, as it turned out I couldn't even afford it on one because I had forgot youths had a 20x signing on fee.

FML really needs a 'project finances' button so you can see what your finances will look like after you have made a bid. So anyway, I have taken matters into my own hands and created a projected finances calculator to work out what my projected will be based on bids in wage auctions and or transfer auctions.

Anyway, if you want to give it a whirl you can download it here: (it's an excel spreadsheet)

Wage Calculator

Just complete the bits in green.

There's a fair chance that i've buggered something up as I had various problems with it and my Excel skills are not the best in the world. I'll be amazed if there's not something wrong with it, so let me know what you notice. I'm finding it most useful already.

Dazed and Confused

2010-04-17T15:21:00.000-07:00

I don't really have anything to rage about at the moment so i'm going to ramble about various things.

First off, the first thing which has enraged me tonight is AI rights. I've challenged this guy about half a dozen times this season, I have challenged him 3 times today (knowing AI was about to be awarded tonight) and left the challenge in for 15 minutes, yet he refuses to play me ? But what's this ? He's won AI over me from sitting online for 15 hours a day. Makes sense, of course... I left some 'appropriate' feedback to reflect my feelings on this matter. (which appears to have been removed, I though it was accurate and fair) I made sure he had to wait the full 5 minutes after he started the game against me too. (He's near bottom of the league, I won 5-4 following some serious ME bullshit)

I played bottom of the league yesterday, he had 0 shots and drew 2-2, like you do. My GK threw the ball into his own net and my DC scored an own goal. He managed 1 shot in the last minute to make the match stats look less retarded. Then there's the match where some guy who had 10 men from the start put 4 past me...

I've most likely won the league like(of course..) but still..

What else is happening ? Well i'm on the GW of comedy it seems. First off some mod buys a shitty youth for 750k, then everyone goes off on one. Then, despite the transfer being totally legal and approved, the player is released to "set an example" of good transfer behaviour and the guy steps down as a mod, totally unrelated. Anyway, the other record breaking transfer, also at £750k also involves a mod, who to "set an example" puts him in transfer auction for £1, then sends a personal mail to the entire GW to advertise the fact he's "setting a good example"

Yeah, I really have no idea either...

Anyway, I was moaning about the lack of XTRA FA competitions lately. So I logged on the other day to find about 20+ competitions set up in the XTRA FA. On closer inspection this appears to be month long Super Man vs She-RA competition or some such bollocks. The GW has positively being crying out for such a thing! Anyway, some normal competitions appeared not so long afterwards, which all filled very quickly, alas none have started - i'm sure there's a good reason behind this...

Beta is going well, following my recipe for success. But check out this RS draft, it's NEVER going to happen like this on live but blimey, here's some talent for you: (the like's of Pato returned but didn't make the screenshot list!)

Rooney sold for £10m, Messi £13m, Ronaldo £9m, Aguero £10m

When the Man Comes Around

2010-04-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

Seems that the normal FML youth player fetish is well under way in most GWs as usual, but i'm going to explain why you are doing it wrong.

On old FML, building an all youth team was a very viable strategy. Even if you had quite a few on high wages you could pretty much sit back, lose all your games, watch them develop and if you had some decent ones and some luck you are suddenly swimming in high reputation superstars that half the GW is after.

Sell a couple on and you were in for a big cash bonanza, keep em and rise up the leagues to start your domination albeit 10 seasons behind everyone else.

I know a lot of people enjoy the youth side of things which is fair enough, play the game how you want, but if people are hoping this is going turn their teams into rich super clubs in the future then think again.

The first major issue you have now is prize money forms a huge proportion of your income. If you are in the Premiership battling out for top spot then you could possibly pull in £4.4m for taking top spot - that's a hell of a lot of cash! But you have an all youth team, your not in the Premiership, you are in the depths conference you are probably looking at closer to £1.5m if you win it, which would cover about £55k wages. You are really going to struggle to amass a team which is high enough potential to achieve anything on the wage budget you have available.

So your plan is struggle financially then sell on your player for mega bucks and make your move. So, who exactly is going to be buying this player for mega bucks ? The guy who won £4.4m in the Premiership I hear you cry. But is he really ? Assuming we are a few seasons into the game his wage bill will be spiralling out of control and he will need to invest heavily in infrastructure while being very shrewd in the market to keep wages down. Sure, teams near the top ARE going to have more money for sure, but they wont be paying £5m+ for your players. They will probably be too busy complaining on the forums anyway ;)

The second problem you have is your team reputation wont go up as it is directly based on how well you perform in official competitions and only 25% of it is based on the players at your club - who will all be low reputation due to the league you are in! So again, you are going to be pulling in far less money on this front too and it will not go up unless you start performing in the league no matter how good your players potential may be.

So your someone who's actually not planning to sell any of your players. You have somehow gathered together a top bunch of youth players and they are all looking like they are going to be stars. So now you are hammering your way up the leagues and heading to the top. Now on old FML you would be in prime position right now due to all your players locked down on low wages. But as you start heading up the leagues, your player reputation is going to rise, your club reputation is going to rise, your players are going to start demanding more and more money and you will need to invest heavily in the stadium. So assuming by some miracle you even get the team to work, what exactly have you achieved ? You are in exactly the same position as the guy who signed a proper team and won the Premiership 7 seasons ago, except you have gone through 7 seasons of being shit.

As I say, i'm sure there's a lot of satisfaction in creating a youth team and rising through the leagues but it is in no way an optimal or efficient strategy. It's likely to leave you bleeding money, being far behind the top teams for a long while and in a worse position by the time you actually catch them.

But what about youth academies ? I'm going to build loads and get some great players! As Jakswan puts it, it's all a bit of a lottery, but look at the costs. A 1* academy costs around £200k build and around £100k a season to maintain. For that cost you could have put together a full 16 man youth team at the start of the GW from the free agent list !

Even I jumped on the bandwagon with this one, but there's tons of -7's on the free agent list in my GW and while they would never have become world beaters they would have all turned a GUARANTEED huge profit. If you are running a 5* academy you are looking a huge £1m expense in the first season. Think about that for a second.... one million pounds.

You are extremely unlikely to get this money back. Youth academies are fun and yeah, the better players are generally going to end up there but you should see them as a luxury rather than an essential element of your youth empire.

So what is the best strategy for making money ? Rather shockingly, it's to create a
decent senior team and win football games! If you missed the boat early on and didn't make it to the Premiership then you can still make a lot of money. It's just a case of putting together a workman like squad on cheap wages and bobbing around in the Championship / Division 1 which will earn you a nice amount of cash.

The final point i'd like to make is the managers paying £500k+ type fees on youth players at this stage of the GW. Unless you were very lucky with your initial pool, you have essentially condemned your team to the lower leagues - your choice. But you have given another team all of the tools they need to dominate the higher leagues early on. If you are hoping to catch them one day, giving them a massive head start probably isn't the best course of action. I've heard of the tortoise and the hare, but the last time I checked, the tortoise didn't give the hare a rocket powered jet pack.

Dumb

2010-04-13T15:15:00.000-07:00

Seems to be a few posts on the forums of late from people who are saying they are bored. I do hope they all give the EFA a try as it is much more exciting with seasons which only last a week. It's much faster paced and there's pretty much always something to play for and always something to do. The allowed AI is 75% too so it's not even as though you need to actually be online that much to play all of the games.

The only problem is it's a bloody nightmare to ORG. It took me around an hour and half yesterday to, properly, work out the AI % for all of the teams in the beta. I made a little spreadsheet to record all the data for all 3 runs. I figured going forward it would probably be beneficial to actually up date this after every run as it would be much less time consuming rather than having to go through 3 runs at once, which was effectively 360 or so team standings!

Furthermore, what really winds me up about this FA is if your not around when the league ends you have no ability to see the league standings so you can totally miss where you actually finished if your offline for that day as there's no way to see the previous table. On top of this you can't see what your AI % is either so you can't really be certain you are under the required level. Due to the launch of live I thought I actually might have been over, but wasn't sure!

So last night I decided the best course of action was to create a site which I would update after each run. On here I was planning to list tables of where everyone was at with their AI% so they knew if they were over and needed to bring it down. I was also planning to include screenshots of all of the league standings so if anyone happened to be offline (even as an ORG I have no idea where I finished in 2 runs until I saw the screenshtos yesterday). I had some nice tables and layouts for all of the AI %'s and standings and ready to upload tonight and was going to update it regular.

But I have discovered this is probably a waste of my time. Because tonight I was informed of the latest FML rule. Your not allowed to link to ANY website at all, in the game, anywhere. While I would probably get away with this in the beta, because it's not policed by fucking retards, I guess it's probably not worth my time attempting to do something useful because it's actually against the rules.

Another made up rule ? Another stupid decision by Sega. Who knows. It's apparently covered in the latest code of conduct.

What Will You Do (when the money goes)

2010-04-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

And maybe that's the reason why,
You're playing for a one-man side,
It's alright when you're winning though,
But, when you lose, you lose alone.

Team update time I suppose ! Not much to update as I haven't played an official game in or seen an opponent in 6 days and have another 3 days to go before the first AI lands.

Predicted points has me top of my group but I can't see it happening. I can't win any friendly games any more, everyone's team is getting better all the while. I was forced into playing my hand early due to my terrible pool which is why I wanted to get as many games as possible in. It would be a collapse of epic proportions if I finish below 4th though so prize money should be good. Trouble is, by my count I need to buy at LEAST 5 players and my older players have lost 2-3 points in some attributes already.

So you remember on the original launch GWs where there was insane inflation at the start and ridiculous transfer fees ? Well, it seems on my GW this is happening again and I just can't understand it!

Not too shabby, but £750k a piece! One of them has ended up being released but it was apparently give the go ahead by the mods before the buyer later said he was leaving.

These are not isolated transfers either, there's crazy fees all over the place. A 27 year old striker, who's CA135 according to FM10 DB has just gone for £650k ! Due to deals like this everyone is demanding around 10x MV for players. People are openly advertising youths as 3.5* potential and wanting 10-15x MV for them, and the bizarre thing is people are biting and buying them!

I think i'm only annoyed because I don't have anyone I can sell, I can't even shift some average players for £1 - who are ironically better than half the youths who are going for silly money.

Well we got a quickplay last night ! The first 32 man quickplay was announced and filled in 3 minutes, then a second one was announced and that filled in 4 minutes, so it seems maybe there was some demand after all. Didn't go quite so well today when they opened 2 at once, advertised each in a different place resulting in both half filling then forgetting to start them so I withdrew after waiting a while.

I saw some super 15 year old wonderkid and was inspired to build an academy in Romania as there's only one there and it seems like a reasonable footballing nation.

Still really bored in all honesty, going to see what the EFA is like next season. I suspect it's going to hinder potential prize money opportunities with 3 runs. From my experience in beta I go from top of league in one run to bottom somewhere near bottom in another.

I reckon my sub must be due to expire shortly after the final qualifying season finishes. I'll see how it goes, but i'm not leaning towards renewing if i'm honest. I think the game has changed for the better but I just don't like my GW at all, the core game experience (in terms of your day to day) hasn't actually changed at all from the original launch, except there's even less of worth to do. I actually enjoy playing on the beta GW more than I do live.

Speaking of the beta, a quick mention to my heroes who won me promotion today. I had at around 4-5 players injured pretty much all season with suspensions on top. Every game was a battle but they seemed to fight for every ball in every game and even with my massive injury crisis they fought to the very end. Due to some issues at the start of the season this run lasted 5 days and I essentially played the season in 3 days. It's probably been my second favourite season ever on FML despite the fact I didn't play 1 human!

What's the Story ?

2010-04-11T07:27:00.000-07:00

It's nice to see that in the post reset world that the forums have come back to life and we are seeing some interesting blog posts and new sites appearing. Over the past few months we have pretty much only had Jakswan's blog to read.

So I thought i'd do a quick round up of all the blogs that have caught my attention or had a post that I have enjoyed reading this week.

The corner debate rages ever onwards on the forum with some people claiming it has completely turned the rankings on their head while others are claiming it has not actually been fixed at all. Over at Fortuna Aeternitas , Guido has an opinion similar to one of my previous stories in We Are Catering for Idiots which has been my favourite read of the week.

Meanwhile the ever present Gameworld One has returned with a redesigned site and some interesting, albeit not exactly mainstream articles. I understand a new podcast has been apparently recorded which is something to look forward to.

If you are interested in stats or want to know how to make some minor skin/text amendments then there's some good stuff over at It's a Numbers Game which I found quite interesting. It has some useful information on jumping and the effects of pace/acceleration on average ratings which is worth reading.

Chief ME complainer during the beta , second only to myself, Guilherme Meyer's blog can be found at Huracan FC where he
gives out some of his tactical secrets and has a little moan about being robbed again ;)

Over at Refuse, Resist, Ramble Rik has wrote a nice piece about how the the roles of Moderators, Chat Helpers and Organisers fit into the (ideal) world.

Tom Delgado usually has something entertaining to say when his seemingly never ending quest for success has taken another turn for the worse. It doesn't sound like things are going much better for him so far as When FML isn't Fun describes, or take a look at his beta exploits here.

Los Elephants is worth checking out too.

I'm sure there's probably some I have forgot about as I always forget the bookmark them so let me know if there's some other good ones that are worth reading. I prefer reading the general game blogs rather than the ones solely focussed on "my team is doing.." stuff.

The best forum thread this week has been Official Quick Play Competitions where Durera has made some absolutely brilliant posts and suggestions on how competitions and XTRA FA stuff ought to be run. I really hope someone is listening to him, I PM'ed him and suggested emailing support to make sure RT had seen it - I hope he does.

Even my GW appears to have a blog! which looks like it's gonna be a winner.

Comments should be working again now, not entirely sure how I managed to break that... even reverting to the default templates wouldn't fix it ! Thanks for pointing this out go to Rik.

Good Times, Bad Times

2010-04-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

I don't know if anyone really reads my incoherent ramblings but I do quite like writing them and I expect this post is going to turn out that way.

I was going on the other day saying it was "all about your form!" and tonight has kind of highlighted this again to me.

I restarted last season on the beta and signed players as per my previous post for my template for success. However, due to the reset I haven't give them the due care and attention they deserve. I play and ORG in the AFA (EFA in live money) and managed to finish mid table in the Championship in the first two runs of the season without really playing much. I was hoping to try and add some weight to my point that player ability doesn't actually mean very much at all but lack of actually playing has hindered this a little.

Meanwhile, my team on live could do no wrong. I log on, get hammered then fluke some last minute winner, score some total fluke, score 2 in stoppage time, score offside goals and everything you can imagine. I've been tinkering a bit on live with some trials and tactics and lost several friendly games yesterday. Tonight I set up a quick play and my team which previously could do no wrong has been thoroughly beaten by pretty much everyone. I ain't too fussed by this, I actually don't mind losing when it's logical, and I deserved to lose these games tonight.

But i've been playing 2 GWs at the same time tonight and my beta team which was previously generally getting pasted all over the place by far better teams has taken the place of my live team! Suddenly they can do no wrong, PP has me top of the league! While typing this I remembered I kicked off a game 5 minutes ago, no worries, it doesn't need my attention, i'm unbeatable! (bollocks, they have just scored... brb! - yeah i've been 2swed!) None of the injuries are sticking tonight, nothing is going wrong.

Back to live, coming up to the last quick play game. The opposition is down to 10 men and my previously unbeatable team can't string two passes together, they can't do anything. They finally get a late equaliser and hold onto the draw like their lives depend on it. It's only a friendly competition, there's no stress and i'm not really fussed, just testing things out and all that.

But it really does highlight just how quickly and deadly seemingly random changes of form can be.

The beta team is in the AFA and we are on a 5 day season at the moment due to some previous issues with the league not starting. So when I logged on I had a shed load of games to play. As per my previous post I started by playing the easy home games first, then progressively working my way up to the more difficult teams to get my form going. This FA is the way forward, I haven't even played an FA game in the last 5 days on Live ! I really think more people ought to try this FA, it's so much better than the standard ones. There's always games to play and the AI limits are pretty relaxed and even if you fail in the first run of the season you have another couple to completely turn it round!

Anyway I didn't get a response to my email to support (I did say I didn't want one, and I don't) however, i'm sure it was just a coincidence that SA10 turned up in the GW tonight. Probably just a coincidence the MP rules changed to some resembling common sense and one of the default EXTA FA competitions actually started. Good work chaps.

Livin' on the Edge

2010-04-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

There's somethin' wrong with the world today
The light bulb's gettin' dim
There's meltdown in the sky

Greetings,

This mail is regarding the GW Butragueno.

I don't especially want or expect a reply but I wish to express some concerns relating to the manner in which this GW is being organised, or not as the case seems to be.

With reduced emphasis on everything but official FA competitions I hoped that moderators and organises would take it upon themselves to turn GWs into a vibrant place of activity and interest. I anticipated this may take the form of friendly competitions run via the XTRA FA in terms of Quick Play competitions, weekly competitions, additional cups and games.

From what I can gather, several of the other GWs are running such competitions, yet in my GW we have had nothing whatsoever. I have asked, as have several other people why this is and the question is either ignored or answered with a strange non-nonsensical response. "We need to advertise it, people need to join, there's not many competitions in the XFA"

As a customer and supporter of the game I find it totally unacceptable that decisions relating to how GWs are run appear to be left completely in the hands of moderators who can apparently do as little or as much as they please. There needs to be some kind of vaguely consistent approach to how extra competitions are handled - they are least needs to be some.

I am really unable to grasp what the issue is here, why can my GW not have extra competitions and games to play ? I simply do not understand what the problem is. From what I can gather, organising the initial qualifying seasons is a fairly automated process so it's not as though their whole time is tied up dealing with this aspect of the game.

Could you please prod someone in my GW to actually do something and create some competitions please ? Failing that, i'd perhaps suggest replacing them with people who have some interest in making this game succeed.

Also some kind of clarification and consistency in relation to rules across GWs would be useful. Why have I always been allowed to use formatted text in the Market Place on previous GWs but this is not allowed on my current GW ? Why do I HAVE to state my JP level and assessment % when advertising youth players ? I could be lying about either fact anyway ? Surely the responsibility should lie with the buyer to discuss this with me. Is there really a rule stating i'm not allowed to post a link to a player that ONLY I have bid on in a wage auction ? I'm told that there was an official mail sent about this, unfortunately I did not receive this. I did request this to be forwarded to me so I could fully understand any additional rules which are not included in the Code of Conduct but unfortunately no one was able to provide this to me. In addition to this there are various other rules i'm fairly certain are simply made up.

Kind regards

-----

email I have sent to support tonight. Had enough already.

Tick Tock

2010-04-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

8 days to go until my next game, good times.

Been outbid on various players so far, can't afford more than about £18k wages on anyone with a £110k signing on fee, about £10k short of buying anyone then.

Had a disagreement with a mod when I told him I don't follow made up rules.

Still no competitions, events or anything of interest running.

Nothing else happening.

Recipe for success

2010-04-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm fairly certain everyone thinks i'm a bit mad and most of the stuff I go on about is wrong, so bearing that in mind i've decided to share with you how to become a great team with a few easy steps. Of course, as with most things no one will listen to me so it makes no difference.

Ingredients

11 Players
1x Corner hacker
1x good corner taker
3x Fast strikers
2x Fast fullbacks
-Simple tactical knowledge

The Formation

Set up a simple 4-3-3. You can use the tactics creator to do this. You want to set it to be more fluid, you can choose control strategy if you think your players are superior but you may wish to stick with standard strategy instead. Passing should be set to more direct and roaming set to stick to position.

The Players

For all players you should avoid anyone with stamina below 14, you can compromise on DCs.

Technical and mental attributes are not especially important, it's all about the physicals, you want players with very strong physical attributes.

Fullbacks should have the following attributes. Pace & Acceleration must be at least 16 (the higher the better) and tackling around 14. Nothing else really matters but other defensive attributes are useful, but mainly look for the physicals.

Central Defence - Heading/Jumping - at least 17/17, this is important for corners. Pace & Acceleration should be at least 12. (higher is preferable but hard to find on a budget) Tackling and marking are the next attributes to look for but are of less importance. Filter on heading/jumping at 17 and tackling 14 then pick the best.

Forward, central - This is your money man. This needs to be your best player, he must have pace & acceleration at least 16+ (preferably higher) with strong dribbling ability. Finishing, composure etc are not important although they are obviously desirable. The faster and strong the better, this is the key.

Forwards, right and left - Pay attention to the footedness of the players, you want to ensure you have a left and right footer. Again, pace & acceleration is required here, you want 17/17 ideally with good dribbling attribute. Nothing else really matters but again, finishing and the likes are desirable.

Midfield - Doesn't really seem to make much difference what you do here. Just go for the physicals, as strong as possible. You obviously want to be looking for good passers and those with beneficial midfield attributes, dribbling is beneficial too. You want a DM in the middle then and at least one decent AMC on one of the sides. I've always been a bit crap at finding midfield players tbh, what i'm trying to say is go for someone who's reasonable in midfield but has very strong physicals.

Make sure one of the above players has at least 17 in corner taking.

The Tactics

You now need to go to all of your individual player instructions and set long shots to rarely. If you have a midfielder with especially good long shots you may want to allow ONE player to be set to sometimes.

Set corner aim to far post, set free kick aim to best header. You want to be taking inswinging corners so a corner taker for the left foot and one for the right would be useful.

You want your best header on attack far post and your second best header on challenge GK (both of these must be DCs, it doesn't work with strikers) and a third player on near post flick, a striker will do for this. Ensure you have plenty of players back so you don't get caught on the break - at least 3.

Duck N Dive

Also known as DnD ;) Ok something you need to understand now. The quality of your team and tactics actually has very little bearing on the result at all. This is absolutely crucial, you must manage your form. It's all about the form.

Therefore you need to ensure you have good form and mitigate any potential dips. You have a massive advantage in home games so you need to start your league campaign by playing a weak team at home to get a strong result. Pick your games carefully, you ideally want to play as many home games, against weak teams, as possible to start you off. It doesn't matter if you leave yourself with a load of away games as you will be on top form by then.

Hopefully you have now won all of your early home games, have followed my above team advice and are now in top form. You are almost unbeatable so challenge the good teams now ! If you go more than 2 games without winning - be that a draw or a loss - DANGER DANGER DANGER DANGER. STOP STOP STOP. DUCK AND DIVE. Get yourself on DND. Stop what you are doing, you are about to enter bad form. You need to find someone bad to play or someone suffering injuries, someone else bad form. Duck in and out of DND and snipe your targets, you MUST get yourself back to winning ways or you are screwed.

I've experienced going 40 odd games being completely unbeatable to literally not winning a single game in 40 games, believe me - bad form is a catastrophe of epic proportions.

Avoid leaving games to your AI if at all possible, it's far easier to beat other peoples AI. If your on bad form, make sure you check who's online in your league before removing yourself from DND. Only do so if there's some easy teams about.

Matches

If you are not in control of the match within the first 15-20 minutes or the opposition is looking dangerous you need to change things immediately.

Hassle opponents and pump ball into the box combined are good shouts. If you have done as I have said you should have vastly superior physical dominance and stamina over the opponents and should be able to take advantage.

If that's not working try run at defence. You should have tons of pace in your side and good dribbling so you can run straight through them.

Avoid going massively attacking if you are losing. If you are going to lose, your going to lose, take a 1-0 defeat over a 3-0, it will mitigate form and morale reduction.

If you are losing but have been dominating the play then control/attacking strategy is a worthwhile change. Pay attention to the condition of the opposistion players and try and push home your physical dominance if possible.

If you are playing a title rival and it's going sour then it's time to get dirty. Get stuck in, your aim now is to injure as many players as possible to create problems for them in other games. Hassle opponents and hard tackling are a must.

If someone has an especially annoyingly good player you may want to hard tackle him from the start to try and injure him, if one of your DCs gets booked then you need to remove this immediately.

Key points

Physical players - do not compromise.

Stamina - avoid <14

Manage your form - duck n dive!

Cooking time

About a season

If your feeling adventurous then try the above without playing 433 but another narrow formation instead.

Of course, i'm totally deluded and wrong about everything so this simple formula wont win you any games, so don't bother trying it ;)

Taste

Hit submit team, sit back and enjoy your 3 strikers bamboozle the opposition defence, i'd suggest eating some nuts at the same time.

*** for reference - i'm currently only employing about half of the above, due to an awful pool, mainly the plan for next season!

I'm the chairman of the bored.

2010-04-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

I'm in the Vintage FA right now and I have played 22 games in the first 10 days or so. This was a deliberate tactic to play as many teams as possible early on while I had good form and before they had the chance to sign players as they unlocked.

So now I have 11 days to go until any AI lands, I have played all of the active teams in my qualifying group and as per normal FML the rest seem to have signed up and not even bothered playing the game. Half my group is inactive or has signed in just a couple of times so i'm unlikely to meet them live.

But maybe something interesting is going on in my GW ? Yeah, I can dream. As per usual, it seems no one has the slightest interest in doing anything whatsoever to make the game fun. It's almost like they want the game to fail ? Maybe they used up all their energy sucking arse to become mods in the first place and can't be bothered to do anything else ?

The number of players on my GW has slowly dropped from 200+ online back down the normal FML number of around 80-100. Why ? Because there's nothing to fucking do, there's literally no reason for me to be online for the next 11 days.

When is the Xtra FA starting I ask. When people have had the chance to join i'm told. What ? Everyone is already in it ? When is the ladder starting ? Soon i'm told.

Seriously, I just don't understand ??? What IS the problem here. Why can't competitions be run ? What IS the issue ? Am I being unreasonable expecting there to be official competitions to be running every day ? I'm paying for this game and there's no reason whatsoever for me to even be online. I know what to expect from the game, i'm not expecting some amazing new single player experience the next time I log in, but why can't we make the best of what we have got ? Why ??

Before live relaunched, when the beta GW was busy it was great, there was always something going on, some event, quick plays, quizzes, RTG for a while, competitions to beat the CPU teams etc etc.

Qualifying is done, as I've stated before you know what the league table is going to look like after a few days. I'm going to finish 1st - 3rd, there's no doubt.

Next season I think i'm going to head off to the Extra Time FA to give me something more to do, and it looks much easier than my current FA so I should be a shoe in for a bit more prize money.

Anyway, i've become so bored i've decided to forget my keep it tight strategy and i'm blowing as much as the bank will allow on a bid tomorrow. I've thought about this extensively and it's a no lose situation, I hope.

Cya in 11 days time barring signing in to make bids!

I'm cancelling!!!11

2010-04-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

Actually i'm not, i'm fairly happy at the moment. However, reading the forums it seems any minor little thing is causing people to threaten to cancel their subscription. In my opinion it's generally a blatant excuse for general ineptness.

Lets look at the common reasons:

Corners

Oh my god, someone has scored 20 goals from corners in 20 games. I'M CANCELLING!!!

T-Bag says: There's not a lot wrong with corners, have you TRIED defending them ? Pretty much every single one I have scored, my corner man hasn't even been marked by a defender ? Do you need an explanation why your 5'6 winger can't mark my 6'6 DC ? There are a few too many goals coming from corners though, so go provide some links so they can reduce it a little.

Injuries

I've had 5 players injured in 10 games, omg omg, this is ridiculous, I should always be able to play my best team at all times, I'm not going to win the league now because I have injuries. I should never need to use any subs or backup players, what is this nonsense!

T-Bag says: Go buy some more players fools. Go create a football squad rather than a team of 11 players. It's not exactly a novel concept when managing a football club.

But but, I can't afford any players ? If you genuinely can't afford to buy some more players for 16k then you are an idiot and deserve these problems. If you can afford 16k i'll be happy to point out dozens of great players you can buy.

Someone got a wonderkid in their pool

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!!! Someone got a wonderkid in their pool and I didn't !! No one should get wonderkids, everyone should get one! This guy is going to be the best team in the world forever just because he got this this player. He's going to sell him for £20m and beat everyone forever.

T-Bag says: So fucking what ? Sort your own team out instead of worrying about what someone else got. Go find some players to make your club better, make your tactics the best they can be for your players, win something, win some money and go buy the wonderkid off him, go buy another one. My pool was bloody awful, one of the worse I have ever seen yet i'm top of my qualifying group. Why is that ? Maybe because I spent a little bit of time sorting my team out ?

The days off getting in early and copying & pasting a list of wonderkids into search have gone. Take what you have got and go MANAGE your bloody team. Sell some players, buy some more. I managed to sell the utter crap in my starting pool so I know it's possible.

Where are my skill points?

SUPPORT ARE THE LOSE, I SHOULD HAVE 50m SKILZ POINT BUT I ONLY HAVE 30m. I'm quitting unless they are all returned within the next 6 hours.

T-Bag says: Skills don't do anything. Next.

Other

This is a genuine point someone made in my GW. Some guy set up a quick play competition for 20 teams, then reduced the number to 10 so had to remove some clubs. To be nice he sent a mail asking people to confirm within 5 minutes and he would remove the away/offline people to get the competition going.

Some guy was AFK at the time then went into a rage he got removed and said he was quitting and moving to another GW.

Another guy was going mad that our FA had no U17 competitions and couldn't seem to understand the explanation that there was only 10 U17 teams on the whole GW.

T-Bag says: What is wrong with everyone ? I must conclude that now everyone has had an equal start and they can no longer hop to another GW to perpetually start again they need a new excuses for anything that goes wrong. Stop trying to justify your own problems with half arsed excuses and threats to leave the game. Someone is always going to make it to the top before everyone else, just play your own game and have fun. The FAs have been tiered in such a way that it actually works much better at the middle/lower levels than it used to so you should never really be having any contact with the better clubs if they do break away.

THINK about what is causing whatever issue is effecting you then THINK about what the solution might be. Tip - It's the bleeding obvious one staring you in the face.

Kung Fu

2010-04-01T03:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Tied up too tight

2010-03-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-27T15:29:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-26T15:32:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-03-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-21T02:01:00.000-07:00

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 !

2010-03-15T14:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-10T14:10:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-04T13:40:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-02T13:57:00.000-08:00

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 !

Can't stand me now

2010-02-28T02:50:00.000-08:00

an ending fitting for the start, you twist and tore our love apart..

So I decided to delete my big ME rant last night because I thought it was perhaps a little too harsh, but on reflection I don't think it was actually harsh enough. I've been thinking all morning how to put into words how awful it is, but I just can't do it.... everything is wrong with it and nothing is right, I just don't know where to start.

It's completely pointless giving any feedback as no one is interested and blatant exploits are considered to be perfectly acceptable. This leads me to believe that everything which is wrong with it is actually deliberate to make the game purposely random and luck based.

Decided to play a match this morning to restore the faith, 6 knocks in first half, 2 shot wondered, super keepered then I score a last minute winner.... business as usual then.

There's not much else I can say which I haven't said before... i've tried.... It's ruined the game completely, I can't stand watching matches any more, every single one is just a steaming pile of horse shit waiting to be kicked in your face. I think this might be it for me, everything else which has annoyed me previously has been fixable, this clearly isn't.

I'm going to holiday for a week, i'll no doubt either come back to winning a league title, being relegated or finding my entire squad trapped in a wardrobe for 25 games after injuring themselves getting dressed. Only the dice can decide..

In the meantime I suggest that everyone sets up the undefendable outside the box corner seen as it's not going to be fixed, so it at least gets more attention.

oooooohhh what a rush

2010-02-26T15:51:00.000-08:00

It was a sell out crowd for my recent cup game as my fans poured in hoping to sing my fans on to cup glory.

It was a fairly dull first half but the fans who disappeared to the bar at half time missed a treat as some special entertainment had been laid on. Having dominated the match before being one shot wondered you could hardly blame the fans for heading off to drown their sorrows with a swift pint.

But as the half time whistle blew, fucking Stone Cold Steve Austin turned up in the stadium on a god damn quad bike !!! Next thing he is driving round the pitch, drinking a beer at every corner flag. The fans are loving it !

But things started to go sour quite quickly as the Ultimate Warrior took offence to such blatant showboating. Next thing is he has run onto the pitch and he's shaking the corner flag, it appears to be giving him unimaginable strength and energy. The away fans try throwing some coins at him but nothing can hurt him now he has shaken the flag!

He's after Stone Cold now but he quickly escapes on his quad bike as everyone knows, Pace > All. But he is still after blood and he's heading to the dressing room. He's dragged Pato out into the penalty area and for some reason Shaun Michaels has turned up and put a fucking ladder up in the penalty area ! With only a few moments left to kick off, Pato decides he best retrieve the ball which has now been located at the top of the ladder, but Shaun Michaels has other ideas and body slams him through the goalpost slightly injuring him.

Meanwhile, the Ultimate Warrior has returned to my dressing room and Gorilla pressed my entire defence into a conveniently located nearby trash can.

Shaun Michaels has taken a special offence to club captain and general legend Franco Brienza and is trying to get him in the suplex, but with a quick turn of pace, Franco quickly escapes because everyone knows...... Pace > All.

The referee signals the start of the second half but it's all too much, Pato has broken the goalpost and his back, he's out for the rest of the season. My defence is trapped in a trash can for the next 5 games an Franco is busy dismantling my stadium to find some steel chairs to deali with Shaun Michaels. (Franco won)