Broken Dreams

Broken Dreams - Things wrong with FM Live

There is no doubt that FM Live is a truly stunning game. Honestly if your even a little bit keen on FM basically ring up all your friends, put an ad in the paper and cancel your life, it's horrendously addictive, but in a nice way.

However all is not well there is one big issue broken dreams....

The game has a very flat Pyramid structure, the gameworld is broken down into Federations, each federation has a 'Premier League' and then up to four feeder 'Division One's'. The difference in money between a top team and bottom is no where near as pronounced as in the real world. You could afford to put together a decent outfit and challenge all but the very top clubs very early on. I think potential football managers is a bit like Driving, ask anyone, Are you a good driver? More importantly ask any man and I bet you get very few negatives.

There is no way to hide in this game, I'm sure that many would blame the game or their bad luck but very very few will stick around to have that rammed down their throat for long, i.e. You are a bad football manager. It's made all the worse by the activity of the manager in entering competitions....

You start a competition easily and players will enter, I have been running a Simple League for Three Seasons and I notice the same thing happening, a wide range, in terms of rank, will enter, a few from the top 100, couple next 100 and so on. A common routine follows, the bottom ranked clubs either rise quickly through the ranks or go inactive.

Half as an experiment I thought I'd try running a few Ten team Leagues, the Premier League (for clubs ranked higher than 100), Championship (clubs ranked 101-250) and so on. Now you check any competition and you will see that the top 100 teams are the most active in joining competitions yet a competition just for them and NOT ONE TEAM has joined! The championship filled up straight away, I think these top 100 clubs are protecting their rank too much.

Even though you may be a bad manager if the pyramid structure was deeper you'd have longer than the game allows for having 'You are a rubbish manager' rammed down your throat. I think most football fans don't actually want to manage Man Utd but would be happy to be managing Wrexham and slowly guiding their route to glory over six or seven game years with a great youth policy etc.

The game needs a deeper pyramid structure to it's competitions and a kinder way to climb through the ranks.

I did have another idea, taking a real world analogy, assuming Liverpool could play as many games as they'd liked and assuming they could choose who they played.... Well why wouldn't they play Cardiff every week, they'd slap them around good an proper. Thing is who is going to turn up... Crowds would be an issue, maybe if a big club had to subsidise playing a lower club and vice versa.

So if you were a Rep 4 team playing a Rep 2 team then you'd have to pay, e.g. the gate would not cover wages / expenses of your club. If you were a rep 2 team playing a rep 4 team, bonus, much bigger crowd than usual. Same size clubs pretty much average crowd no change....