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 1999Well 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.
1 comment:
Jak, I completely agree with #7 and am kind of baffled why there's no PPC search campaign for FML at all - because it's a ripe low competition market.
I did some testing a few months back for FM-Britain and had no problem getting #1 ad placement for virtually any 3+ keyword phrase related to Football Manager for 10 cents a click. (which could be used to promote FML to those searching for FM2010 stuff - since many FMxx gamers likely don't even know FML exists)
Even in the "online football sim" search market, it looks like you could get at least a #3 placement for pennies a click on long tails and not much more than a buck for 2-3 keyword phrases.
Combine that with some good copy & a well-optimized landing page, the conversion rate wouldn't even have to be too high (0.5-1%) for it to show a profit off a 3-month average FML subscription length.
Add on some more effective SEO techniques on-page (as well as off), between the organic & paid results - it seems like an absolute no-brainer to me.
Don't get me started on Facebook. All you need to do is make a very simple FML app, tie in some dirt cheap CPM ads - and there's no reason you couldn't draw in tens of thousands of qualified leads. If the official FM pages could get 100k+ fans organically as it is, I can't imagine how much that would multiply integrating a targeted campaign to pick up the entire demographic.
Or instead of this, keep on spending $5k-$10k a month on magazine ads no one reads and TV spots everyone skips over.
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