Pre-selected squads

Another of the new 1.1 features is the pre-selected squad. These have caused some low-level concerns for some user, so Ov Collyer took the time to explain exactly how they work.

Never one to do work unnecessarily, here's me quoting what Ov said verbatim:

"All GWs start with a database of 50,000 players.

Of these, 1100 x 18 = 19,800 players are assigned to balanced 18-man preselected squads. At this stage these squads are not yet assigned to clubs.

As clubs sign-up to the GW, a club is chosen from the 1100 reserved ones, and then 'tuned' according to the manager's nationality/location. This involves swapping players from the chosen squad with players from another unchosen suqad to try and end up with more players of your nationality/location/favourite club (that is why it reserves 1100, instead of 1000 - so that even if the 1000th team joins, it still has 100 more squads to swap with to find players familiar to you).

When you first sign-in, your chosen squad is activated, meaning the players all sign 24 hour provisional contracts as you are used to.

All players assigned to preselected squads (whether assigned to a club or not) are locked and unavailable to any other club.

When the first season starts (7 days after GW launch) all unclaimed preselected squads are disbanded (so a club joining after this point won't be given one), but the players are only unlocked gradually over the course of the first season, rather than in one go.

By the end of season one, no players are locked.

Finally, the other change from beta, is that scouting skills *do not* come into it during initial squad selection, whereas they used to. So if you decide to change your preselected squad, you have full visibility of all other players in the database that haven't yet been chosen (either in a preselected squad, or manually by another user.) The reason this was changed was because otherwise, what with 19,800 players + invisible (from scouting) players locked, it was getting a bit restrictive.

Once you confirm your squad (whether its a preselected one, your own, or a mixture) then the players sign on full contracts and from that point on its business as normal - scouting skills will limit your visibility of the players etc.

What the system aims to do:

- give everyone a fair chance. You don't need to arrive on the dot when a GW launch. Indeed this system was designed for the hard launch of the game when people will be going out and buying a boxed copy, returning home and expecting a GW to be waiting for them to choose to join. The GW launch date will perhaps be a lower-key thing.

- provide flexibility. If you don't want any players, or some players from your preselected squad, you are free to throw them away and replace them with anyone else unclaimed.

- stimulate the early transfer market. Maybe you have managed to be assigned a player that someone else badly wants - no problem, with the transfer rules of 1.1, you can sell/swap from your initial squad right away (although no cheeky short-term profiteering allowed )" - Ov Collyer, on the SI Forums.

It should also be noted that you don't have to accept the pre-selected squad - you can ditch some or all for other players before hitting confirm.

I like this new system - to be honest, the majority of new FML managers (and many older ones too!) are pretty poor judges of a player, so anything that levels the playing field in the early stages of a Gameworld are fine with me.

I had my reservations too, but I was pretty pleased with what I got in my Coppell auto-squad. I swapped about 6 or 7 of the 17 or 18 then went with it. Most of the initial squad don't last past the first season anyway, so it's not worth worrying about too much!

Daily Income changes to come to FML

One of the more controversial issues in recent times in FML has been the ability of some teams to rake in huge amounts of money whilst having a tiny, often rubbish, squad. The idea is that they pay, for example, £20k in wages per day, and still get income on the normal £100k-£300k per day scale based on team reputation.

This is clearly a bit of an exploit, as it allows them to stockpile millions of pounds per month whilst not actually playing the game 'properly'.

Of course, fiscal prudence should be rewarded, but the most important thing surely is that the game is played competitively by people trying to win games and enjoy themselves. So I was pleased to see discussion today of the changes being trialled in the test world, GW24 (Haynes).

I'm going to quote posts made in the beta forum by FullMetalRacket and the FML god, Ov Collyer...

If (wages + 10%) < 100k then income ranges from (wages+10%) up to 300k depending on reputation
If (wages + 10%) >= 100k, then income ranges from 100k to 300k depending on reputation.

So, if you had wages 20k, then your possible daily incomes would range from 22k minimum, up to 300k maximum, according to your reputation (so a rep of 1 * would bring in 22k, a rep of 5 * would bring in 300k)

If you had wages of 120k, then your possible daily incomes would range from 100k to 300k, according to your reputation (so a rep of 1 * would bring in 100k, a rep of 5 * would bring in 300k)

So this new system doesn't stop people from making money, but limits the potential 'damage' that can be done. More importantly, it still allows and encourages people to go the youth route, but...

Daily income is kind of an approximate representation of your club's sponsorship, merchandising, and (until stadiums are in-place) match day income.

A club built on players of a very low wage isn't very appealing, and so shouldn't generate so much of the above income - unless it still performs successfully despite being built on a shoestring. This change reflects this.

Importantly, this stops a situation where a team can sign players of a total of say, 20k in wages, and rake in an 80k a day profit, which isn't realistic, or good for the GW...i.e. why should a user be able to effectively do nothing apart from play the minimum number of matches to stay ranked, and make more per day than someone playing the game "properly."?

I know some people will say they are using the above loophole to go the "youth route" - my answer to them, is the money you make by going the youth route, as in real-life, should come from selling your youths in the future.

So thanks to Ov in particular for some terrific posts explaining and justifying the move. Now we just need to convince SI that teams need to have at least a minimum number of players!

This move with daily income, with other methods that are incoming, should also help stabilise a gameworld's economy in its formative days, which can only be a good thing.

The FMLa Sutra - an FML guide for new starters

I know a few of the guys are planning to write guides and advice etc, but I would be neglecting my duties as a mod blogger if I didn't try and pen something myself. Now, I also don't believe in re-inventing the wheel, so if someone else has written something really well - well, I'm gonna nick it, get over it. I will try to give credit/links/kudos where appropriate though! So here we go...

READ!
SI will send you emails and documents - bizarrely, these may contain words written after the download link!! And they may attach help files - whatever they send you, read it. If there are instructions on getting forum access, follow them - it's a beta, not a free game. And once you get the access - give feedback... Also, read the blogs, read the fansites - there's a huge amount of info out there.

GIVE FEEDBACK!
SI need info. They are essentially geeky geeks with no awareness of the real world. They know not of this 'sun' in the sky that mysterious visiting prophets speak of. Well, actually, none of that's true - they're decent guys. But they do need feedback, and lots of it. So leave some - how was your initial experience? Were things intuitive? Did things make sense, could you find things? You get the picture - making the experience better for new guys is critical in making them want to stay in the game.

IT'S NOT FM08!
And yes, there will still be an FM09 (and it will be great, I suspect). One of the main stumbling blocks that people hit is getting the concept of FML. This isn't a real-world simulator like SIs FM series. It's something different... It's not for everyone, but a lot do like it! FML is pick-up-and-play, it's quick, it's streamlined, it's fiendishly addictive, it's about community... Read the blog, some of the old posts must cover the FML concept!

STARTING OFF!
Well, first off - you can't be Chelsea. No, not Man Ure either. You need to pick some players - an initial squad needs to have 16 players. You can do this in one of two ways:

(1) Auto-select. The game picks players for you, based on criteria set by you - this can be useful in finding cheap players that you may not have considered normally. The squad will have a decent average level, but probably won't be fantastic. Quick and initially painless.
(2) Searching manually. This will take a fair bit longer, but is likely to lead to a better choice of players. Maybe it will take an hour; it's interesting that the low level scouting skill will mean you have 5% more players to choose from, and takes less than an hour (probably!), don't you think? Anyway, to do a manual search:

Go to World - All Players and filter for Free Agents - these can be signed in your initial squad as long as no-one else is bidding on them (seen by clicking the contract screen) - Richard Tebbutt.

Now, unless things have changed, your initial squad needs to be under £100k wages and you'll have £500k to put towards Acquisition Fees - you don't need to spend it all.

You'll get a daily income paid out at midnight (UK time) which currently comes at between £100k and £300k, depending on your team's reputation. So you can't get into debt with your initial squad. Once the FAs start, they will also be a source of income - but the midnight daily is the main source.

STUCK YET?
Each gameworld has a team of genius experts, handpicked from FMLs userbase by even genius-er experts. Your moderators will appear in the main chatrooms at the top of the list, with names highlighted in blue - if you've got any questions, these guys are there to help. Ask in the help centre, someone will get back to you as quick as possible.

RULES
Now that you're in the game, consider where you are. You've just become part of a community - read the rules, ask for clarification if necessary. Have fun, but treat people with dignity and respect. The mods are there to police the rules, and we will, and do, discipline or boot people who break the rules. That said, I didn't post over the weekend because I was meeting up with three good friends - guys I've met in FML.

If you're not happy with the conduct of another manager - well, the feedback system is there to be used (note: used, not abused!), or take it to a mod. Don't send emails en masse slagging them off! If someone has said something in chat - take a copy of the text, mail it to the mods. We're here to help.

Also bear in mind when chatting - it might be late where you are, you might think it's OK to take the chat in an adult direction, but FML is a global game, and there will almost certainly be young users from elsewhere in the world online at the same time - it's not late everywhere! Keep it clean.

SKILLS
A lot of people don't get these at first. I've discussed them on the blog a couple of times before now; they allow you to specialise your team. It would take 6 years to learn them all...

On the skills page, there are four windows (I'll add a graphic later to clarify this).

• Top window: Lists skill currently being learned, with completion time
• Middle-left: Lists skills learnt already
• Bottom-left: Lists skills available to learn
• Right: When single-clicking on a skill in the left hand windows, the info on that skill will be displayed here.

To start learning a new skill, drag the skill from the bottom left window, to the middle left window.

Also the skill planner is just that. It helps you plan which skills to learn in order to reach a specified target skill. It will NOT change skill for you, and you can't queue skills. Shock, horror - you'll have to come online to do that for yourself in an online game!

When you start, you can select one 'area' to receive a boost in - so make sure you us that setup wizard!

PLAYING A GAME
Well, that's why we're here, right? You can right click on people's names, and challenge them to friendlies - or you can use the Find Opponent wizard to set some criteria and get matched up with someone else who wants a game. This wizard is in the top menubar, on the left hand side, of your main FML window. Once a challenge has been made and accepted (in that same place), you've got 5 minutes to finalise your team and tactics, and press Submit Team...

Things to remember about games in FML:

• SI only make one match engine. In FML currently, we have a more advanced version of that which is in FM08. We've had several updates since then.
• Real humans are much better, and generally more offensively-minded, that the AI opponents you may have faced in FM. You're going to need to be more flexible, and make changes more often to survive. I'll cover tactics in a mo.
• Remember that any tactic changes can take 10+ matches to take effect, so don't change too often and let any changes settle before making judgements (Richard Tebbutt)
• Teams are generally fairly equal in FML - even if separated by many ranks, and especially in the early days.
• You won't win all the time. It's not FM - form is harder to define, since you may be playing against the top 10 of 1000 teams in one match, and the bottom 10 in the next!
• During a game, you have 1 minute at half time, and 2 minutes for timeouts - so use it, when you need to make changes.
• Play at the speed most comfortable for you - don't let people rush you. On the flip side, don't make people wait around unnecessarily. if setting up is going to take you a few minutes, pop into the match chat and let your opponent know.
• It's customary in FML to wish opponents good luck (gl) at the start of a game, and to thank them for a good game (gg) or for playing well (wp) at the end. Simple courtesy - don't over celebrate goals, or abuse your opponent at any stage; well, not until you've gotten to know them anyway!

TACTICS...
OK, so you've lost your first game and are now slightly bricking it. Maybe you need to tweak your tactics? Well, FML has an excellent and much-improved selection of default tactics to choose from - I hear 4-4-2 standard and 4-5-1 attacking are very popular this year. Many teams have a lot of success simply using one of the many defaults; however, if you want to go for more of a custom fit, well, you'll need to learn tactics skills. So rest assured - you've time to learn and tinker before some tactical whizz can really use his nous to hammer you!

Another key thing: the arrows you're used to in FM are gone, completely, as discussed in old posts. Arrows now are only visible to you, and represent your forward runs setting (a forward arrow = forward runs often, a back arrow = forward runs seldom). To change the arrows, you'll need to learn the Individual Players Forward Runs skill.

BUYING PLAYERS AND CONTRACTS
You can't sell a player during the initial 7 days of his contract, so it will be a week before we see any auctions or private bids involving other teams. You can still sign free agents though, just bear in mind that you will now have to go through a wage auction to do so.

Only ever bid what you know you can afford - bear in mind that you have to pay the Fee (Acquisition for now...!), PLUS the wages! Your projected balance will show the state of your finances in 28 days, and if this figure starts getting too negative, the bank will veto further spending. You start off with an overdraft facility of 100k, and this will increase daily to begin with. I think the maximum is £1M. Go over that, and the bank manager will come knocking - so remember, always think in terms of Fee + 28 days wages.

As for contracts, well - the system is designed to promote fluidity and mobility. You can lock 5 senior players, and any number of youth players - though don't rush. The initial contracts will be for 28 days, and you have three options:

• Don't renew
• Auto-extend - this is the fabled 'lock'. If you remove a lock it CANNOT BE APPLIED TO ANOTHER PLAYER until the end of the current contract to which it had been applied.
  
• Auto-rebid - the player enters into an end-of-contract wage auction in the final 24 hrs of his contract, and all managers are free to bid. If you lose the auction, the other manager will pay you the player's acq fee, and the player the wages that they offered. If you win, you pay the player the wages the second highest bidder offered, plus £1.

Remember: Only ever bid what you can afford. There are always plenty of other options, don't get ripped off!

On the subject of auctions - it is never possible to withdraw a bid in an auction. Don't bid unless you're sure. The act of bidding influences both the likelihood and value of any further bids, so to be able to withdraw would be unfair on other managers...

FOOTBALL ASSOCIATIONS
Join one, and soon - pick whichever is best suited for you. The FAs will pay out good money, and offer official competitions against opponents who are most likely to be online at the same time as you. Assuming you pick one that suits!

When your FA season kicks off, you will receive the minimum amount of prize money up front - that's normally whatever you'd get for coming bottom. At the end of the season, you will receive the balance of the prize money for your final position - e.g. if you got £800k for coming first, and £400k for coming 20th, you'd get £400k at the start of the season, and then a further £400k if you won the league!


Right - I think that will do for now. Some self-discovery is good - remember: have fun. It's a great game, and it's going to be a massive success. Get to know the guys in your world, be an active and vocal part of your community. I'm sorry, but you're about to make a lot of very good friends. Good luck!

P.S. I know Marcin in GW4 has written a nice small guide - you can grab it here.

Poor form?

In another of my takes on the hot topics from the official beta forum, today I'm going to have a word about the way form is handled in FML.

Clearly, modelling form is vital in any football game, be it management, simulation or whatever. But FML presents an interesting challenge - players might be making 1 or 50 appearances a day, depending upon the activity of their manager, and those appearances could be spread over a bewildering array of different types and levels of competition.

Take a team that is ranked 100th out of the 1000 teams in a gameworld - one could easily imagine them being the bottom seeded team in one competition and the top seeded team in another. So, in this tumultuous environment, how do SI model the concept of form?

Well, the answer has been to store form on a per-competition basis. It is this competition-specific form that gets fed into the match engine, and this idea has sparked some controversy. I can't summarise it better than Owen from GW4 did:

If Man United had lost their last 3 games in the Champions League, but then won 10 games on the bounce in the Premiership, when they return to play Champions League, their morale would be high because of how they're peforming in the Premiership, not because of how they've been peforming in the Champions League (since the 3 matches they lost were before their 10 wins).

But there is a second effect - morale. In this case of Owen's, Man United would go in to that 4th Champions League game on a high thanks to their 10 match unbeaten run - the high morale would cancel out their form.

At the end of the day, there are a lot more factors going into determining a result in FML than can be made sense of. Teams are very equal - people assume that a team that is 100th will be many times better than a team which is 500th, but in actual fact the difference in their squad's average (hidden) Current Ability stat is usually in single digits. The players play a huge role, as well as tactics, morale... form is just a part of the picture. Individual competition form may not be a perfect solution, but it's good enough for the job and not a huge factor.

I always wonder with perceived problems like this if there is actually a familiarity problem.

By that I mean that managers play their FA opposition very frequently, both because they share the same FA and because they are likely online often together, so are more likely to enter the same unofficial competitions. You get used to those teams, and over time gradually your tactics come to reflect what is more likely to succeed against those teams you play most often.

When you step outside of that, you come up against a batch of teams that you are set up less well for, since you don't routinely face them. Usually for me this has meant getting gubbed for the duration of a cup or league...

Stress Test Success?

SI are beavering away on updates and optimisations, trying to make sure that the game is running well and that the servers are stable and lag free. Earlier in the week, I mentioned these stress tests that they run sporically - well, I got lucky and caught most of one short one last night - and it was in my humble opinion a remarkable success.

350+ people online, and the lag was fine. I was playing a match, browsing through player searches and profiles, and chatting away - and everything was pretty smooth.

There are still not enough people turning up, or sticking around, for the stress tests - and a small minority of those who do are not really contributing, choosing instead to spam moronically in the chatrooms (damn the lack of my mod powers during stress tests!); the sooner these guys get joined in as well, the sooner stress tests will be consigned to history. Because have no doubt - SI are winning the war, and FML must then surely be coming sooner rather than later.

Judging 'Judging Potential'

One of the key feature sets in FML are the Skills that managers can choose to learn. I've covered these in detail in the past, but what has caught my eye lately is the debate raging on the official forums over one particular skill - judging potential (JP).

For those not in the beta, this skill allows the manager to determine, on a 1-10 scale effectively (from 0.5 - 5 stars) how much potential a young player has; a player with 5-star potential is destined to become world class, with the right training and experience. There are 5 levels of JP skill to learn, with each increase bringing an increase in the reliablity of the shown potential.

In the early days of the beta, there were no skills - and therefore no JP skill. It was hard to tell how good any given youth was, and so teams would sign as many as they could in the hope of unearthing a star. This had two effects: the fierce competition drove up wages for youth players, and teams had massive squads - many of whom never got near a sniff of a game. I remember one FML legend who had over 400 youth players...

This was clearly madness, and then the skills arrived. By learning first some of the 'Scouting' skill (Levels 1 and 2, maybe 3 I forget), and then starting off JP, managers could see which youths had potential. Everyone caught on straight away - everyone started learning JP. What was intended as a boost for youth specialist teams became available to the masses. Teams no longer hoarded so many youths - they didn't need to sign the dross - but competition for players was (is) still fiercesome.

It was clear that JP needed nerfing to some degree, and so SI changed the setup so that you need, I think, Scouting Level 5, which takes I guess 2 (real world) months, before you can begin learning JP - much more of a specialisation. That only applies in the newer Universe 2 gameworlds, so I don't know how well it's worked out - but debate is raging as to whether further nerfing is necessary, or whether JP needs to be removed altogether.

For me, I remember what life was like without it, and I wouldn't want to return to those dark days. But I would like to see it maybe made a little less accurate. Perhaps instead of the current 5 levels, we could have a 3-Level system as follows:

Level 1 (quick to learn): +/- 2 stars
Level 2 (takes a while): +/- 1.5 stars
Level 3 (takes aaaages): +/- 1 star

Signing youth players should be a gamble, progress must not be guaranteed, and I think the current system is maybe just a little too accurate.

Also, the future planned feature of youth academies, which will be added some time after the retail launch, has to be built in here somewhere - how would these work, and fit in with the existing setup? It's going to be exciting seeing what SI have up their sleeves, but this is a key area for many people - they say you never win owt with kids, but in FML, that's not always the case...

Theme Teams...

One of the popular trends in FML is for theme teams - everyone likes to sign players from their favourite club, and I'm doing this now as much as possible.

I've had Gary Cahill for ages, who was on loan at the Lane until Christmas. Then I signed Billy Sharp, and i recently got hold of Matty Kilgallon. Today, though - it got serious. I signed Michael Tonge, and he's playing well. I've got a bid out on another Blade as well - do I go all in? I could probably pick up a couple more, but I'll be struggling to get a full first eleven I think... Still, I always said I'd do it before the end of the beta!

I've seen some quality theme teams over my time in the beta, and it's certainly one way to personalise your FML experience. It also gives you a good excuse for being rubbish. Speedy Gonzalez was always a favourite - a team made entirely of players whose surname was Gonzalez. It was made more ironic by the fact that there is a properly decent Gonzalez, and the guy couldn't sign him. Africa FC has always been popular too - it's possible to build a very good side using only African players (and I've seen the same approach for Chileans, Italians, Englishmen...).

There's also always the possibility of only signing youth players - an approach that has been very successful for some, most notably in GW4 for James Aspey's Hackney Rovers. I think the key here is finding a youth striker or two who can really bang in the goals at senior level.

Anyway, back to the topic in hand - we're heading into season 6 now, what Blades players are still about...

FML vs FM

So I promised I'd write something tonight banging on about the similarities and differences between the two products in the Sports Interactive stable.

I got FM08 on release day, from the retailer I thought most likely to deliver early. I was as desperate as ever to see the latest edition. However, I'd got into the FML beta last June, and alas my copy of FM08 has been sadly neglected. I play now and then, but FML has added a social aspect to the game that is almost irreplaceable for me, though I'm starting to make time again now for my first love!

So... FM09 will surely be out some time between October and Christmas 2008. FML is out in the summer. Which is for you?

First things first - FML is not FM Online. They are two different games, entirely - FM already does online, and does it perfectly well, I imagine. FML is a whole different experience, for some it will be better, for others worse.

FM09 - and you heard this here first - will be terrific value for money. There's no other product that can deliver so many hours of game per pound (dollar, whatever). That's a lot of hours - and if you have them, great, it'll be a match made in heaven. But a lot of people don't have time for FM any more, many of its fans have grown up with the product. It's these guys who are going to need to be a bit more casual for which FML is intended.

There are plenty of hardcore guys in the FML beta, who spend massive percentages of their life online and believe that FML is for them and they should have every advantage going as a reward -but they are wrong. FML is designed from the ground up to reward active players - irrespective of how active they are. It's perfectly possible to go on 2 or 3 times a week, or to only play 2 or 3 games a day and still be massively successful.

The other aspect of course is what FML can bring to FM. Naturally there will be feedback between the two. The match engine is in continual development, and having 6 GWs playing tens of thousands of games every day has proven a great test-bed for it. The match engine has come on in leaps and bounds - especially in terms of realism. Gone are the arrows and the contradictory instructions - a defensively-minded midfielder being forward-arrowed, a guy on the left wing playing in the middle because he's been side-arrowed to the right wing - and I believe they're gone for good. Alternatives will be needed in the longer term (hopefully for FM09, at least), but the balance is now much better.

There are also some other features that must make the leap to FM09:

• Customisable view filters. Want to rank by Heading and still see Value and Injury Status at the same time? Fine!. I have set filters made for every eventuality, and it puts me in charge of what's on screen, and how it is displayed. This is massively empowering, and would bring a big breath of fresh air to FM09. Of course there are still good default filters, but you don't know what is missing from FMs UI until you've tinkered with this in FML. And that's customisable filtering for every screen by the way...
  
• Player stats page - no offence to Ter, or whoever designed the Stats page for players in FM08, but it's shockingly useless. I've got David McNamee at right back for my Sheffield United squad - he's made 304 out of 435 passes so far this season - is that good? I've no idea. There's an orange bar by it if that helps. Well it's kind of yellower than orange... Hmm. In FML, we see percentages - my right back in FML (Greg Halford, who will be leaving in just under 3 days as he's up for sale) is on 73% for passing. His backup, Ivica Boatic, is on 63%. Any clearer? I think so...
• The UI - it's clean, crisp, and I know where everything is - in FM08, I'm often left floundering - getting to my reserve fixture list takes 4 clicks. It takes 2 in FML.
• Custom slider settings. What's the difference between width = 14 and width = 15? I don't know, and what's more I don't want to care. The skills in FML have meant that I can customise how many notches my sliders have - and for me, that number is 7. Not 21. We've got to be able to customise this in FM09.
• Fractional match ratings - yes, seeing a player get a 7.1 is better than seeing him get a 7.
• Shot feedback - clear cut chances, number of long shots, blocked shots - all good, all helpful. Too many long shots, even though the players are all set to rarely? Maybe you're too narrow...
  

The overall theme I guess is 'customisable ease'. Hopefully this ease and improved playability will make it into both of SIs games.

Things in FM that shouldn't make it into FML? Why not...

• Team talks - these are pretty tedious in FM, to be honest. Imagine multiplying that tedium by several orders of magnitude as you get through thousands of games...
• Media - again, likewise. Unless it can be done well, it should all be user-driven in FML.
• Realism - FML isn't FM, it's not about real football and real league structures - there has to be a balance between believable and fun. Who wants to pay £x a month to languish forever 10 divisions off top-flight football? No-one, pyramids for the win!
  

Tactic Skills - my verdict so far...

So the update landed yesterday, and I've been messing about with the new tactics skills - I've detailed these in a previous blog, and here's a picture for 'Tactics 4' to show a bit more about what the story is:



Now I have to say, it's been controversial, but not nearly as bad as I expected - a lot of people see the positive side to it.

For me, I think they've got serious potential - I used the setup assistant to become a 'blackboard manager', which meant I got Tactics 1, 2 and 3, and 4 other tactics skills straight off... which gave me most of the basic functionality. This level of ability gives me 7 notches on the instruction sliders, which is all I ever wanted anyway - while people who feel the need for more can train their skills up for each slider quite quickly to get 11, 15 or 20 notches (I think). So I get what I want, they can get what they want - genius!

As I've said before, the skills are all about team specialisation - so if you want to be a tactical whizz, fine - but you'll have to spend a wee bit of time getting the skills first, just like I will for my youth academy...

As for the tactic skills, well I'm giving them some time to settle in, and I'll give full feedback in good time - maybe some more skills should come with Tactics 1 (that unlocks the team instructions sliders, maybe it should unlock set piece takers too?), maybe some could be combined... but all in all, great so far for me.

One other new feature that stuck out for me is the new activity stuff. This can be a bit of fun, but also can be helpful for identifying when an opponent is likely to be online:



One thing is for sure - I need to get out more!

The financial lowdown...

I've found out more info on the new finance system in FML, with regards to how it handles debt - I'll hand over to Ov Collyer, and quote what he said...

Ok, here is how it works with the recent changes.

- every club now has an overdraft facility (OD) that starts at -100k and after 7 days of signing-up, starts rising at the rate of -25k a day up to a maximum of -1M. NB it will only rise (at midnight) if the club is within their current overdraft limit. A team restarting has their OD reset to -100k.

- interest is now paid on all debts, whether you are within your overdraft limit or not and interest (both credit and debt) is now factored into your financial projection, which it wasn't before.

- the bank will veto you if, at any time in the next 28 days, you will exceed your allowed overdraft. This is different from previously where it would compare your balance *after* 28 days and check if it was better than -100k. This old method meant that a newcomer could go into significant debt (almost -2M) rightaway, which isn't sensible.

- the transfer budget displayed is now basically showing 50% of the amount you can spend before your bank will veto. This is to encourage prudence - you can still spend up to your veto limit but the risk is that if you do you will effectively be making a loss, so it's more sensible to encourage a little bit of cautiousness and the transfer budget simply halves the amount.

- you will only go into administration or receivership if you are -2M in debt AND your projected cash (after 28 days) is also worse than -2M.

So hopefully that will help us all out when the time comes on Wednesday...

• FAQs

So the projection won't be important any more?
That's not correct - it will look for the minimum level over the 28 days now, not just the final figure.

How will this affect existant managers?
Anyone who has been in the game long enough will have the maximum -1M OD limit.

Big changes afoot!

Cluster 2 (gameworlds 4, 5 and 7) will be seeing some big changes in the FML universe this week:

• It's update week

We'll be getting the latest FML code, hopefully on Wednesday - at this stage, we're getting closer to retail so there won't be too many 'wacky' changes or massive new features, but SI have been busily beavering away at solving lag/freeze issues, so hopefully that will improve an experience that is already pretty good in my opinion.

• Tactics Skills

This will be the contentious issue of the week - I've discussed these in the last post I made, but this is the week we get to get hands-on. We have to remember that a new user coming in to a new gameworld, such as at retail, probably won't blink an eyelid at having to learn skills for tactics. I for one am looking forward to improved default tactics!

• Injuries

It's long been a bugbear of mine that we do not see anywhere near enough injuries in FML - typically there have been about 0.5% of attached players out injured at any given time, which means teams can get away with running 16 man squads and avoiding games when 1 player is out injured. The update will raise this to around 4%, which is a much healthier figure - still low for real life, but should bring something of a challenge. I've heard rumours that the number of training injuries will be lowered in the near future, so most injuries should be in-game ones that stick. The likelihood of an injury sticking changes with activity, so casual and hardcore players should see similar rates - neither will be advantaged or disadvantages, like now.

• Finances
  

We'll also be seeing some big changes in how the game handles debt. Many of the batch of managers added last week really struggled with the finances, and got themselves into debt - often having to restart having just bought their favourite player in real life, even though they couldn't afford him. Once I've figured out what the deal is, I'll post back here.

• Cluster revamp

The fundamentals of how FML clusters are arranged and the overall architechture are being revamped. The bottom line for Cluster 2 is that our hardware is going to be moved into the Cluster 1 enclosure.

The knock on is that we'll be getting code weekly like Cluster 1 (and in some cases more than once per week). This is not expected to lead to any slowdown for users.

• Forums

The FML forums will also be getting a new skin and there will be snazzy new logos coming which will wow you all, I'm sure. I've seen the work-in-progress new skin, and it's very nice indeed.

Discipline

The hot topic of the moment in FML is discipline, and how it should be enforced in an environment where people are paying for the pleasure of playing.

The system we've got at the moment is a series of procedures that we should follow: a quiet word, an official warning, yellow cards and red cards - a red card is a short ban from the game. This works quite well in beta, as naughty users enter into the chain of punishments at various stages depending on the nature and severity of what they've done wrong.

The best tool of course is the game itself - most things that people might do 'wrong' have been coded out. The main problem we see these days is with the in-game chatrooms - 'The Lobby' is intended as a room for general chat, but in GW4 it has become a mildly intimidating place for most people, ignored by most due to a small number of users 'dominating' it. How to police something like this?

The first point is evidence - we can get access to chat logs, but it's quicker and easier if a user sends us a copy of anything dodgy. Abuse is not tolerated, and the punishment varies - if we can prove a user has been racist or xenophobic, they can be removed from the beta straight away. As a mod, I have no economic interest, so I'd be happy to request account deactivation come retail also, though the decision would be escalated then to a 'supermod' at SI/Sega admin.

The difficulties really are with offences under the label 'undermining a mod' - these are the people who can make a mod's life miserable. Constant backchat, personal abuse, unfair criticism - it's all in a day's work. The mod manual lists this as Medium (first instance) to High Severity (second instance) - persistent is a banning offence, so for Medium I'd be looking at an official warning or yellow card. Offenders immediately plead innocence, maybe that it was just a joke and subsequently any punishment from the mod suddenly looks heavy-handed.

I fear that we will be getting to study this in the beta test a bit more closely yet.

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...

Update Wednesday!

The servers have just gone down for GW4, with Marc Duffy from SI holding our hands to calm our anxieties over being FML-less for maybe as much as 30 minutes. How ever will we cope? It's always one of the most exciting times for me - when I log back in, the game will automatically update my client software, and I'll be able to get straight in to the new features. I can't wait!

This one should be a real zinger, as well - the match engine will be upgraded to match that used in FM08's new 8.0.2 patch (and my tactic is working pretty well in 8.0.2...), we're getting new kit styles and graphs - a real graphical overhaul that's proven popular elsewhere.

There are 4 public test worlds for FML - 2 500-user worlds that see regular updates as and when necessary, and 2 1000-user worlds that only get updates once a month. GW4 is one of these worlds - we seem to always get the update on the Wednesday afternoon of the off-season week.

Now I just can't wait to get stuck back in...