Rich

Just thought I'd try to further highlight the issue of cash with my Turk team (or Tmaz for Rik :) ).

As you can see a whopping tax bill is due and I've got quite a few academies on the go, they have already pumped out enough to keep the first team pretty much shored up for the next few seasons so I have a massive amount of cash still floating around.

You might think well £100k wages underachievers...

Ok we're not setting the world on fire but pretty consistent Tottenham like performance in the top tier.

I never trade players that's a sleazy part of the game if you ask me:p So it's just pure keeping wages low and reaping the inflated rewards.

I think I might have glossed over Youth Academies as well I've always said they were a cost based lottery system and the part that I've ignored is cost based.

It's not like the UK lottery where you chances of winning are 1 in 14million, its more like 1 in 100. A rich man can buy 100 tickets a poor one cannot and of course if you've been playing for five weeks or fifty weeks your chances of winning go up a lot.

Back to the team I should be battling wage demands now but players that have been doing ok in the Premier League are still asking for very low wages. As it is I'm throwing money at youth academies like it's pocket change. Needs a fix FAST!

I see Turk is now getting a little inactive managers signed in last seven days is under 600 now. I'm assuming there are still quite a few on long subs like me as well.

If you have chance fill in the poll on the right I'm going to do something with the data, I know it's a straw poll but still.

Jobsworth and the New ME

Well Jobsworth might be a bit harsh, here is my thinking I've two subs both run until October, I might keep Turk open but Voller zero chance.

So I got to thinking I wonder what these real players database's will be like as a new manager coming into an old world. I thought I'd get the Voller account transferred so I wrote to support. Hey it gives me some value for money and heck I might even stick around!

Reply: Sorry we don't do that any more. buy another sub.

Me: LOL  errr no thanks.

The GW's are all full so I guess their not overly bothered about saving one account which is understandable.

The new ME has been in beta for a while now and as I far as I can tell according to my Bio page I have one of the best teams in the Division.

Although this team, is a proper mature team is still gets owned by a team of youth with less ability. I think the Coppell ME is lagging behind Miller so this might have been fixed .

The Dressing Room is Superb and all players are superb morale yet despite being one of the best in the league on paper and already Quarter Finalists in the Cup they sit in a relegation space.

Competition form but that doesn't exist... So erm lottery I guess.

A New Podcast

Keep an eye on Gameworld Plus for a new podcast featuring Rik of GW plus and Thom from Los Elephants.

I don't know how it's going to come out by I felt it was a pretty balanced discussion on 1.7 and general FML stuff.

In other news I've asked to move the Voller account into a real database world for two reasons, one, just to see how that plays out a few seasons in and two, of the two live accounts I might keep one going and it would be the Turk one so with a few months left just as well get some more experience.

FML & Mass Quitting

It's a sad day to see so much negativity on the forums and even T-Bag is packing his bags. I've haven't always agreed with T-Bag heck it would be nuts if we all agreed all the time but his blog was always entertaining and will be missed from the now shrinking scene.

FM Live remains the type of game I want to play I think I'm a little more forgiving than T Bag, I really don't mind losing as long as I can reconcile the defeat with some sort of footballing reality (my major moment came when I saw a 17yo tuck a seasoned 31yo up for 90 minutes).

I think from the looks of it PaulC has this in mind for the future of the ME so I can see it getting sorted. As I've said I'm not expecting perfection as everyone has a different idea of what perfection would be. Sadly a lot of forums posts are 'my team wins = perfect'.

What I can't see getting sorted quickly enough is the other issues in the game. It's all the more annoying as SI seemed to have turtled up and don't seem to be talking about it anymore.

Maybe we, the community, have got too much rage and they've turtled up.

FML Stuff

Only a few months left on my subs in retail worlds. The Voller team I flogged the lot had £15m in the bank and thought lets go nuts in wage auction. Ho hum seems that my definition of nuts is some way off what the economy is doing.

£15m is now worth £1.5m when the GW opened so I got a few oldies to just idle the remaining time out. In Turk squad looks ok and should survive another Premiership season.

Coppell the team is doing ok in the Championship which is a little unexciting. Subs wise I'm not renewing there is an outside chance of staying on in Turk but it is a very remote chance.

I did spot a team in Turk with a wage bill of £733k so erm yes the economy is just fried. Seems his tactic is to buy in wage auction and then sell once the sell on clause has passed.

The sell on is designed to discourage this sort of behaviour but with inflation the wages are nothing compared to what you can get for fairly ordinary players. See I almost did a post without mentioning inflation.

On that note I bought a £650k Aq Fee Dc for £8m in Voller, I was drunk at the time it seemed like a good idea. Just as well spend it with subs being over in a few months.

Turk team my MR who's also DR is getting on a bit at 33 and has lost some pace so think I'll play him as DR now and got a High Profile MR.

Other than that I can see on the forums that mainly SI seem to be in 'rabbit headlight mode' they did this with DYM comps. It was an issue so first is do nothing, then think about doing something, then half do something, then finally make a decision and put it into effect.

I think this is worrying if you have a clear idea of the direction you want the game to go and steer it there. If you have no idea on direction you'll bumble around for ages before doing anything.

The economy is broken, £700k wages case in point, what's being done?

Starcraft 2 Has taken me

By taking the back off my laptop, propping it up 1/2" off the table with a fan running full pelt into the back of it then it seems to run Stracraft 2 stable.

The game is hardcore I didn't really appreciate how much. Blizzard seemed to have that intention as well, there is no unit that does everything but everything has a counter.

The Pro players (apparently there are proper pro players earning a living playing Starcraft 1) have an APM of 200 odd (I assume this is actions per minute). I'm still blindly stabbing around at 10 APM, so a n00b of the highest order.

It's erm quite big in Korea:-



The single player though is pretty dam fine, best game I've played for a few years anyway. It's strange most of it so far has been easy, certainly feel as if I was going to be successful, however there is always something you could have done better.

As these missions are pleasant to play through I'd be quite happy to start again. The are essentially pretty basic, it's built massive army and attack. This in itself is fun but there are some twists and somehow Blizzard have stopped it being boring.

Enjoy watching some you-tube multi-player stuff as well, there really is a massive community in this game.

Positive Post - My FML fix list

Well I must say I'm a little encouraged by the ME from Coppell experiance, young players seem to flap and my 32yo AMC seems to be playing like err a well experianced 32yo. Remains to be seen if it's fixed but I suspect it's better at least.

The ME failing is what was the final straw for me. As this is a little improved lets roll back myself to being a little more positive.

So lets look at my main issues are try to react to those:-

1) There isn't enough to do, it's so boring, get a nice youth prospect he'll be great in six months. This is a game and not 1980's play by mail.

International's as per my International Concept would fix this. It adds another game effectively. I'm not a coder but it mostly uses exisiting modules and wouldn't take much to code.

If you started it as a Beta feature with no injuries and no impact to player rep then it's almost completetly isolated from the main game so has no major long term effects on the GW.

The reworking of YA's was a bad choice for 1.7, if it in anyway has long term effects on the GW which this does then it's going to need to be tested for 6/7 months on a beta server to know if it's unblanced in anyway.

If it doesn't get that time then it's a risk putting it into live, I think FML needs to 'connect' with the community again with some good news.

2) The ME moved so far away from reality that it's no longer football.

It's got better, I know Paul C has a tricky job because anything can happen in football and it often does, then everyone has a hard luck story to tell.

The one thing that FM or CM in it's day has always had is players are subejctive. What I mean by this is that there is something in a black box which you can't see which makes them better or worse players. I suppose this is hidden stats and the game still has that magic to it.

It lost it for a while but hopefully it's back on track.

3) Inflation is so rampant that it has made money relatively worthless effectively what killed FMLv1 is now ruining FMLv2. This impacts EVERY area of the game from new users, how much players cost, how important prize money is, etc etc.

This should have been addressed in Season 2, it was clearly going wrong then. This has massive ramifications in the game, not least it turns it into Football Trader Live, blah blah, I've gone on and on how bad this is.

So what to do, well the wage multipliers are not coming in fast enough. I've a solid Prem team in Turk and I'm extending contracts on 25yo with no increase at all!

Max contracts to one season for a start and get multipliers kicking in faster.
Bring back the old overdraft rules.
Increase profit tax.

These are just a few things off the top of my head but at least ackonowledge it's a massive problem and then start sucking money out of the GW.

Ovberall SI with regards to this issue need to proactive not reactive.

4) By their own admission FMLv1 was killed by SI's mis-management.

Ok lessons learnt strict GW opening policy is now effective.

5) When new features are introduced they are bug infested.
6) More often than not the fixes for the bugs introduce more bugs often with worse effects than the first bug.

OK FML has failed and with just a few thousand subs you can't sustain a massive coding team. Baby steps would be better, as I've said earlier the YA being re worked needs a lot of testing Internationals doesn't.

7) Pathetic Marketing, type 'online football management game' into google no per per click advertising no attempts made to get to the top of the organic listings. These are terms that would cost pennies!

I'd give SI my time for nothing, chuck £250 a month into a google account and start getting some traffic to FML website. Last time I used Facebook per per click it was very cheap around 5 - 10p a click and and you can target a very accurate demographics.

Lets get the community to post up some backlinks to the site using anchor text like Fantasy Football game and Online Football Management.

Not going to got into a massive SEO rant but it's not hard to get a lot of this traffic for nothing.

8) 3d Match Engine that would look cool if it was 1999

Well it's a bolted on feature to an existing ME so you can;t expect too much.

9) Reward Points, half arsed, half-baked idea, pathetic.

International Management feature makes ample use of this.

ph34r my l33t skillz in FML?

I hardly log in so gawd knows what this was about but one manager from Voller sent this extract to the mailing list:-

'so take it like a man and get used to looking up when you want to see my name'.

Good grief I don't know what FML is but I do know in multiplayer gaming it's a nothing game, I think more play Barbie online. I wonder if they p0wn:)

Spent loads of time recently watching some pro videos of Starcraft and it does kind of bring FM Live into perspective.

Anyway from what I've seen of the new ME in Coppell it looks ok to me, still get that 'loaded dice' feeling (I was 1-0 down to a much better team and got a dodgy 30yearder to win in the 93rd minute) but football is a bit like that.

When we have lost it's been to a team of proper grown up players.

Stayed for longer than my usual five seconds in Turk the other day to see some teams with very scary wages bills. Wondered how they were able to afford but looking at their transfer history shows some great deals for them.

Football Trader Live lives! That's one good thing about inflation is that you can trade to the top, I guess that is what SI intended... unless they dropped one? Nah must have done that on purpose :p

The New ME & Last Update Too Harsh

Someone did say I was too harsh on SI recently, in my defence this is a company that I felt almost tricked me into subbing for the game. That might be me putting a spin on it, but fact remains when I asked for a refund the reply was blunt.

If the refund had been given and I was just beta testing I'd have cut them some slack but I'm not a charity and I stand by my stance that as a commercial game the progress has been dire.

I'm also not buying that the lack of new features in 1.7 and FM On-line is coincidence.

Anyway the new build of the ME has arrived in Coppell and I took it for a spin. First game lost 4-1 at home now you may think I'm going to whine about this but that's not the case. This was a team full of solid mature players and were definitely underachieving in the old ME build.

My £600k Aq Fee 19yo Left Back had a few moments of madness, good! Meanwhile my slower ageing 32yo AMC seems to have a positive effect.

Next game it's on of these teams full of 19yo, they had one 31yo but out injured, looking at biography their on of these fast progressing teams, 0-0 not really realistic but take my bad form into account not so bad.

I'm thinking form isn't with me although this remains a mystery as players are mostly superb and Dressing room says Very Good and we've gone long records of WWWWWWW this season. Another thing that needs fixing methinks.

Next game with my team 17.1 ability v 16.1 ability then 3-0 down at home in 19 minutes, same team that got me to 4th in league is now falling apart to 19th team.

Despite all this the ME might well be working fine my main issue was on a macro level.

So if I look at the three results with a 17.1 team I lose 4-1, 4-1 and draw 0-0. Interesting is that the draw comes against an all youth team. The other two sides are worse but at least their proper senior players.

Good!

Next game mostly young under 26 so not youth but lying 4th, drew2-2 away.

Overall it's a Macro level thing for me and I think I've caught underachieving teams and I've got BF the 0-0 makes sense anyway.

FML could get a little better, ok with all of the issues it's not going to be enough for me to re sub but at least I think I can get some value out of my remaining time.

Starcraft 2 is very intriguing I've watched a load of shoutcasts on youtube and can see why it appeals to the pro-gamer. Sadly my laptop crash's a lot so playing on-line for me isn't viable currently.

If I can find close competitive games (even though I suck) I might get into it.

Starcraft 2 Downloading the Game

I wish this was on steam and on not on yet another software system.

I missed Starcraft One at the time for two reasons, the first, I was a quake whore and secondly, at that I thought I didn't like RTS.

A few years after Stacraft I got into Command and Conquer so my view changed on RTS. I've had a lot of fun with Zero Hour and Battle For Middle Earth and even Company of Heroes. I'm awful at RTS but still enjoy the games.

My outside view of it is that it looks dated but clearly the original must have been some game. Will see once it finishes, come on Battle.net!

Great News FM Online is being made!

However not for us for the Koreans, doh.

Not only do I feel screwed over after SI refused to give me money back on pre-paid subs as I felt like a paying beta tester. I now learn that my beta testing time which has cost me best part of £200 is now going to be put to use in another market quite possibly making the game that FML Live should have been in the first place.

I'm simply thrilled!

For an encore all current subscribers should bend over as we've been taken every other way.

Good news though this will only benefit FM Live though as no resources will be moved to produce this game but instead only new resources will be used. Yeah right, I know what that looks and smells like, shovel it somewhere else. We've seen what's planned for 1.7 pretty much a patch for a bugged feature.

Now so this post isn't taken in isolation here is my current list of issues with FML:-

• 1) There isn't enough to do, it's so boring, get a nice youth prospect he'll be great in six months. This is a game and not 1980's play by mail.
• 2) The ME moved so far away from reality that it's no longer football.
• 3) Inflation is so rampant that it has made money relatively worthless effectively what killed FMLv1 is now ruining FMLv2. This impacts EVERY area of the game from new users, how much players cost, how important prize money is, etc etc.
• 4) By their own admission FMLv1 was killed by SI's mis-management
• 5) When new features are introduced they are bug infested.
• 6) More often than not the fixes for the bugs introduce more bugs often with worse effects than the first bug.
• 7) Pathetic Marketing, type 'online football management game' into google no per per click advertising no attempts made to get to the top of the organic listings. These are terms that would cost pennies!
• 8) 3d Match Engine that would look cool if it was 1999
• 9) Reward Points, half arsed, half-baked idea, pathetic.
  

Not really sure why I'm still posting about FML as I'd like to move on, however I'm still dam annoyed at trying to cancel with four months left on two subs and wanting a £40 refund.