Saturday 27 February 2010

The Elephant in the Room

As I said last update I'm enjoying Horton such as it is but when I think about here is what occurs to me.

1) I log in for an hour or so three times a week.
2) In that time I play around 4/5 senior games
3) That is 15 games a week, 45 a season

So say I log in at 11pm I'm very unlikely to meet someone who does the exact same thing but logs in at 6pm.

So really the 'Active FA' isn't really a hardcore FA what the heck is someone going to do who only gets 4 games a week. Seriously are they going to actually cough up £4.99 for that?

That's not hardcore is it? I mean £4.99 should give me at LEAST three hours a week in fact lets be honest it's borderline that I'd pay for it.

I'm a FAN of the game!

So why don't I log in more, well there is nothing to do, yes yes community, yeah but facebook is the dogs bollocks and it's free.

What else then if I'm not a chatter, buy sell players? Not an option. Grind to progress? Not possible. Play meaningless games to win some tokens? Yuck there is nothing at all that appeals to buy with tokens. Youth? Commit finical suicide.

I played FM10 for a bit the other day, imagine if you could only play 10 games a week so a season took a month. You'd lose interest right?

Take any issue, lets say the ME, it can be frustrating when your on a bad run feels like nothing makes a difference, the loaded dice syndrome. These runs can go on for weeks at a time. Seriously weeks of not being able to do much and £4.99 a month!

So why the fudge does a season take a whole month in FM Live?

3 comments:

T-Bag said...

They should add in the ability for your own team to compete in real life leagues like on FM10, so you have reason to stay logged in more.

Unknown said...

hey jakswan

you sound a little down-beat about the game of late...??

is that as a result of the recent changes to the game? the number of active players? or a more generalised indictment of the game?

as posted on the official forums, i am monitoring forums and blogs to see the current state of the game, and the recent changes in the lead up to possibly coming back to the game. is this something that you might be able to comment upon further?

i hope that numbers/active players would increase after the reset, which may alleviate some of your concerns? or is a general lack of number of games as well as a lack of "things to do"?

jingo_man

arnoldinho said...

Interesting Jak. I remember not so long ago you arguing that casual players might be better off playing FM10 because they could dip in and out as they wanted! But I agree with your current viewpoint far more - with FML the fact that things move on without you encourages you to log in if only out of curiosity and even if you get bored and decide to take a break for a while, you can log back on and things will have moved on from the boring patch rather than being stuck exactly where you were before...

I also agree with you entirely on the pace of the leagues. I remember suggesting a while ago on the forums having different GWs that moved at different speeds which wasn't popular, but different FAs within one GW that moved at the same speed could definitely be a runner.

How about if one GW year lasted one month of real time, with 24 days of competition and 4-7 days (depending on how long the month was) of "off-season". Within the 24 days of competition you could have high-speed FAs that ran their leagues 3 times (once every 8 days), medium-speed FAs that ran their leagues twice (once every 12 days) and slow-speed/casual FAs that ran their leagues once.

If divisions had 16 teams playing each other twice as standard, that would mean fast FAs gave you about 4 league matches a day, medium speed FAs 2-3 a day, and slow/casual FAs 1-2 a day. Personally I think this type of approach would allow players to find the right FA for them far more easily than under the immensely complex system currently being proposed by SI.