The Beta So Far!

As I can not play i thought I would try and sum up my feelings so far on how my experience so far has gone. Having joined in February it feels like such a long time ago as my team have come such a long way since then. In some ways thats another plus point of the game you can become so absorbed in how fast the gameworld moves in reality to time in the realworld. When I have played Fm in the past you are infinitively aware how long a season takes to complete or how many matches you can get through in a night.


Jumping into FML was daunting at first I hope with these new gameworlds Si have taken steps to ease new managers into the game. When I joined there was things flashing at you mail about a 2 million pound bargain wonderkid you will never afford etc. So this was part of my original feedback. Creating your team with kits, stadium and everything else was easy.

Playing matches getting usewd to formations and tactics was also an eye opener. Before playing FML I regarded myself as reasonably tactically aware. I have played several Clan games for FM that spanned several seasons. In FM even human vs human matches people will usually try and keep balanced formations with emphasis on defence as well as attack. There wewre the occasional crazy formations people would try different things to try an exploit a weakness in opposition. Getting into FML it was soon clear alot of people played one way attack attack attack! Now me thinking tactically I know how to cope with these crazy formations and the teams with 3 strikers 4 attacking midfielder and wingers for full backs. Except in fml either I wasn't as good at tactics as I thought or things work slightly differently then they do on FM. I think it was a combination of both really but one thing you can be sure of there will be a manager you come across who will be trying to find some exploit in the the match engine. Now another thing which I feel will help the situation I confronted is the tactic skills. I know discussion on these has been everywhere in the last month or so and I have pretty much not spoken on the subject. A new manager joins the gameworld has roughly a week until start of the season plenty of time to play friendlies in readiness for the season. In the matches to start with the manager will be using a default for formation. Now they can identify and unlock skills needed to create a good tactic. At the same time they are not exposed to a formations like I was. It is also a great way to watch matches and see where you would like to change tactic. Using a default I watched a match and was thinking I need my midfield to hold a ball up instead of giving it away. I want my striker to try and beat his man not lay it back into midfield.

The transfer market is another hotbed of debate several times managers in gw4 would moan the markets dead I can't sell my players because no one is buying. Or later the market is too over inflated everyone asks for too much for that player I am not paying that much. there has been problems in the gw where managers could spend money they didn't have effectively then ending up going into administration. In this case the bids should have been blocked by the bank and they wasn't. Many people seeing the situation exploited it selling players at vastly inflated prices while they would receive the cash if the paying team could not afford it would end up going into receivership and the player they broke the bank for would then go back to a big team in receivership auction. Anyone see a pattern here? SI addressed the issue and fixed it but the damage to the gw economy at that was already done. Another issue was Finance skils. Leaning commercial gave too much money to clubs some people were getting projections of 20 million etc. Again SI changed it so now I have perfect opportunity to see the fixes of these issues in the new gw. Aside from that I always found buying and selling not that much of a problem in the gw. In my first and second seasons all I did was use free agents. Took me the first season nearly to afford my ex goal machine Anderson. After the those two seasons I wisely used end of contract wage auctions to pick up a few promising youth players.

The social aspect of FML. This is was something I was a little surprised at how well the chat rooms and sense of community can grow so quickly in FML. Again at first the chat rooms seem a little daunting but once you had a while to look and see what typically goes on they can be a great place to just spend time and chat. I would spend plenty of time in the lobby chatting about current events usually footy related. While also many people that do know me would know I sometimes would have trouble sleeping. I could log on and just help some new members of the game world watch a few games and give some tips. Sometimes its a bit more difficult to do this during the day when people challenging you and trying to buy or sell players etc. Since the community is so wide spread it means you get a diverse range of peoples opinions this can be great for discussions and looking at things from different perspectives.

There so many positive points as to why I enjoy fml and also a little insight into some of the problems we have seen from beta. Now I have been basically a week without fml it seems a really long time its such an absorbing world to be a part of. Now back onto this week and hoping the new world is ready to go Tuesday so the Tradesmen can get back to business and I can try out these shiny new mood tools (evil grin). Btw changed the look of the blog slightly I think its a bit cleaner and more readable now if anyone wants to leave some feedback on the changes anything you don't like etc please do so.