Speculation and Server Crashs

The server crashes \ outages of late it would seem are as a result of SI making some serious changes to the infrastructure to the servers. It used to be that you were on a cluster and now this has gone and there is only a server farm.

Again pure speculation on my part but I think this had to be done to support players moving gameworlds. Further evidence of this is found in that you can no longer change your team name, according to SI team name is a global variable that must be unique across gameworlds. Interesting.

Even more intriguing was that as the servers came back up instead of logging in you were greeted with a mock up of 'Choose which team you want to manage' and a long list of blanks. According to SI this was to 'enable support for those with multiple accounts'. It was then odd that OV said it was a 'glitch' and then Marc Duffy said it was 'no more than two accounts'.

I'm curious because the screen clearly was designed to list more than two, and, this may be wishful thinking, but I don't think this is what this screen was designed for. The single most important feature yet to be in the game is the manager / club are separate entities.

Having got the game stable, and I suspect that recent server outages were down to a big change to architecture, thoughts need to move to a more long term view of the gameworlds. Take Gw6 every season around 300 users have been kicked for being idle, you could argue well it's beta but I don't think so. FM Live, it's been said so many times, is extremely hard, no save games, no database hacking and the competition is from humans is a millions miles away from AI in FM08.

So this begs a question are they really going idle because it's a beta or because it's too hard. What makes it worse is that your stuck, bid £100k for a player in a wage auction and feel the pain for two months. So with all these managers leaving, the clubs die as well, and another 300 clubs are created.

The established clubs can cream off the talent that's released and if your new to the Gameworld you've no chance of securing anything decent and will be forced through months of of pain before being able to secure some really great players.

So you try the beta in an established Gameworld and stare into the face of two months hard slog to get anywhere at all, most won't do it so the next month another load go. So it goes on.

Now imagine a new Gameworld starts only 1000 clubs can be created after that the only way into the gameworld is by taking over an existing club. Now you may think that this is a pain but in Gw6 Ronaldo is with a idle team, going to be a bit easier than starting from scratch if you get to take that job on!

You may bugger it up but at least you can get a job somewhere else, different types of job, a team once renowned throughout the gameworld fallen idle and now a sleeping giant. A team that has remained small and you've a chance turn things around. A club up to it's eyes in debt and your brought in to bring stability and turn the corner.

Heck you could have a FM Live carear as a hard nosed troubleshooter just putting things right financially before moving on elsewhere. You could become a trusted 'babysitter' and take over the reigns during someones summer holiday, a temp if you will.

If you wanted you could form new clubs stay for a few seasons get a youth policy going and hand over returning years later to see if you founded a club with worldwide stature. Then you could play the old fashioned way sticking with it through thick and thin year in year out.

It's not impossible that you could aquire earnings and be able to buy clubs in your own right. In other words instead of the club having a bank balance it's your bank balance! Heck you need not even be able to be just a manager anymore you could become Chairman or own a bulk of shares. Wow the ideas, the stories, the game!

Ok getting carried away but prior to the change to the servers this sort of thing was not possible now it is. The team at SI got Championship Manager running on an Amiga you better believe that they have the vision and ability to truly turn FM Live into something amazing!