Thursday 3 April 2008

Solid start to season

The Football Associations got underway in GW4 on Monday night, with things much easier to organise than ever before. The extra 24 hours of peace and quiet for organisation, added to all the new mods made it much simpler than ever before.

One new feature is the requirement for all FA competitions to be approved by a second moderator, and this has proved valuable - a number of errors were picked up, and sorted prior to launch. Some still slipped through, but that was inevitable with such a massive shift in user numbers and consequently FA league and cup structures - they aren't catastrophic problems, and can be sorted for next season.

The other big scandal of the week has been player aging - a bug has prevented players aging over the past couple of seasons, and it was finally time for them to catch up to the correct age, so SI made the change, and it caused a few angry heads in GW4, since our FAs had just kicked off, and some teams now found themselves in U21 leagues with squads that contained players who were 22 or 23. People have to remember though - it's a beta test, and that's another bug fixed - and something that won't happen in retail. Also, GW4 doesn't exist in isolation - the bug was fixed just after our fed season launch, but it's still off-season in a number of other gameworlds - GW7 in particular. So while it's meant a few short-term ballaches for us, it's for the greater good.

The final mention for 'solid start' is for my Blades side - I've made a decent start, losing 3-1 in a close game to James Aspey's giants Hackney Rovers, ranked 8th in the world, and picking up decent wins over a couple of other top sides - when I logged off last night, I was 3rd in the DFA Premiership. It'll never last.

One of the wins was over a manager who's been grumbling on about the match engine for a few days - playing against him, I was able to discover that he's playing some particularly daft and unrealistic tactics. Go figure...

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