Subject: I gotta rant....

Well I suppose I'll add my 2 cents to a few points.

The first place I will give a little talking is....yeah you know exactly what I'm going to talk about

3. Tactics. I'm probably going to get many of you to disagree with me here but I think that tactics play WAAAAAAYYYYYYY too large a role into the outcome of games. IMO, if two teams are marking almost the same as each other, then the team with the better tactics should win about 60-65% to 40-35% of the time. But when one team outmarks the other by 7-10 points across the board then I don't care what the dumb tactics are, the better team should win that game 90-95% of the time, just like they would in real life. I'm not saying that upsets should never happen or that form shouldn't play a role as well, but right now, it's way out of proportion to reality. Scale that back down a bunch Sokker. Which leads me into the next huge issue ......

Tactics are the only reason I play this game while my hattrick team sits with a big bank account in the bottom league.

I know what you are saying about the better team should win more and yada yada but tactics are not the problem, the problem is the game doesn't allow any adaption once the game starts.

For example, let's say I play 4 defenders in tight and my opponent plays 1 striker and 1 winger far outside. In reality, I'd be like "okay sure this is easy, we'll just have 1 defender move out to guard the winger. In sokker, this doesn't work. Instead the winger will run free the whole game because he guessed (or scouted) that you play a tight middle defense. As much of a problem as it presents, I don't have too many issues with this mainly because I love scouting and playing the guessing game. I think that brings all the fun into it when you have to try and play to counter your opponent. If you didn't have to do that, then every game you would just let your players go out in the same general formation then make adaptations 1 minute in and be fine and the game would be boring (unless of course both of you could keep changing tactics as the game is played but everyone isn't always going to be online during matches so that would just be dumb).

Where I do have an issue with players not being smart is, as you were saying, in the 8-1-1 formation. There is no way in hell that 1 striker should ever have a chance when I have 4 defenders and a goalkeeper in the box. When all 4 of my defenders are in the box and a cross is played, instead of making sure they cover a man or even get to where the ball is going, they just chill in their designated spots. I think when defenders are running back or at LEAST are in the box, they should have some sort of instinct built into the game to where they will mark up on the attackers in the box. Then you can have some sort of calculation to see who will win the header and etc but if there is only 1 striker, maybe 2 guys mark up on him and the other 2 go to their positions.

Since this would take away a little bit of offense (but in reality it would just force people to stop turtling) I think they should also do a little bit more with forwards. Like you were saying or someone was saying, have them run to open space or have give and go's or maybe even add moves the player can try to do to juke a defender instead of just maybe breaking a tackle and then being slowed down.

I don't really care to touch on many other of the issues but I would like to add a little something for training. I think training should be left alone. Yes it makes sense to be able to train each player however you want, but that would completely shatter the economy of this game. something like goalkeeping which only trains 2 people a week suddenly would allow everyone to train goalkeeping and teams would become increasingly amazing very quickly since you could just buy a bunch of youngsters and train them all in whatever you wanted to train them in. Also, you'd never really need to buy and sell them that much anymore since you could just change what u train that individual solely in.

I think it's best to keep the training system the way it is simply to keep young players flowing around the market

you all make good remarks! I agree with the defenders issue. If someone's offence is based on a divine striker agaist 4 defenders the game becomes dull and is like watching a game of kickball. I also like the idea of a team whose players know each other longer should have an advantage. I like the game, and I also would like to win more often, but more than wining, I like to see an entertainning games.

Did anyone actually watch the last world cup. No one played 8-1-1 but almost every team played a variation of 4-5-1, mostly 4-2-3-1, including both finalists (spain and holland), germany, japan and others. Commentators at the time were talking about the death of the paired strikers. I have the same problems with the AI of the players but the formations are not that unrealistic.
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The biggest problem with this game, IMO, is the marketplace is broken. The number of people playing has been pretty stagnant, so there is a growing number of very well trained, but no longer trainable, players at every position. It is nearly impossible to make decent money by buying good trainees and selling them, because there are plenty of players in the 24-28 age range at almost every position. That market is too cheap, and the trainee market is too expensive. Unless they fix the economics (the best way being to boost the demand for trained players by getting new users), the game will deteriorate as every team basically can afford to buy multiple divine players.

By all means, give me the money to afford multiple divine players who arent older than 28..

the thing i hate about crosses like that is the way the goalie just stands there like an idiot watching the ball bend right in front of him. you watch a real soccer game the goalie will charge out and knock the ball out with his fists, or catch the ball. this would be influenced by pace and maybe tech or something like that too.

the overall play of goalies pisses me off... they move way too slow, they run backwards and then forwards to kick the ball out...? what is this animation???

to continue the rant.... simple passes from player to player are wayy too difficult in this game. i mean i'm no major league team, but when trying to feed my winger... a guy with formidable passing and other players consistently pass the ball behind him and usually out of bounds. i loathe this. watch a high school or club match of sokker... they generally have the ability to pass the ball back and forth with accuracy.

okay okay last thing. corner kicks. wtf is with 40-60% of total corner kicks never coming into play? i swear to god if my winger with incredible passing hits the side of the goal one more time ima lose it.

one more thing. a long pass that rolls to a stop is almost always mishandled by the receiving player. why is it so difficult to handle a ball that literally is not moving??

You can find one of those defenders for $4m or so. Maybe a bit more. A few seasons ago, they were $6m.

Regarding the rant about players and their selling prices:

It is ridiculous how difficult it has been for me to find decent trainees at a fair price. I used to be able to buy my trainees around 400-500K and they'd be just a little bit below u21 quality

Now I'm bidding on those players and they get bid up to like 1.7 million

Knowing roughly what they'll train to, by the time they hit age 24 they'll only be worth like 2 million.

There is much less profit now for training and it seems I'm only cycling through players to survive and break even without having an old team

4 defs vs 1 striker and crosses - I (6.5) know this situation from the real life, so I think here players height value plays some kind of role when crosses go through.
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I'm a striker and my team plays a 4-5-1, so often it's a 1 vs 4 battle up front

I will tell you about 10% of my goals come from a winger crossing into the box and it's only usually when the winger gets a breakaway and I'm able to get behind the defenders and hit the cross while moving and before they can get back to cover me, or if I have midfielders in the box with me who can get the defenders attention. Almost never have I been alone in the box with 4 defenders and been able to score unless something strange happened.

Most of my goals come from breakaways from through good balls.

so I'd say Increase the passing (I agree it's totally ridiculous that my players will have outstanding passing and they can't send a ball 10 yards without missing the teammate.) and increase player awareness (defenders try to cover players, strikers try to go to space, etc)

Maybe it's because I've only done longterm training... But the most money I've had at one time ever was like $9 million...(This was about 10 weeks ago when I sold my whole team to restart new with younger players all around) That's apparently pocket change to some people. Now I suppose I could have gotten lesser quality players and relegated to C-League and had more money to spare.. but I rarely have more than $750k at any given time.

this thing with expensive trainees means you should really focus on having a big junior school and taking advantage of the situation

ant the STUPID way friendlies affect rankings.
the last two weeks I have won my league games to go up 20 points, and then lose my friendly to drop 40 points.

I just want to add some more info as to where we left off last week.

"Smirker:
The Fan mood is nowhere near fixed. Here is an example.... I am 4th in my league, so I'm in the top of the table....I win my league match this week to stay in 4th place, get all 3 points, yet I still have 9 supporters leave the club. That makes no sense.


Dagwood:
Fan Mood is weighted, and since your last game only makes up about a tenth of that, we have no where near enough information to say if it makes any sense. "

Well, I won my match yesterday and now have a 2 game winning streak and I moved up in the table from 4th to 3rd. I won the match 2-0 even though I had two red cards, and I still managed to lose 8 fans. NO WAY IN HELL that happens in real life. The fan mood engine for this game is FUBAR, and really does need to be fixed.

lol guy on the TL with a 38 day injury. thats a long one

Mats Kamberg

Do you think thats a high bid for a 24 YO devine defender with only excellent pace?

$2.5M